The kinder-garten : principles of Fröbel's system and their bearing on the education of women ; also remarks on the higher education of women

LIBRARY

\ OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.

Deceived \^\ Q ] 393 . 189
^Accessions No.HQQoct . Class No.

o i«y^ • '^v

1 '"

FKOBEL'S
SYSTEM OF EDUCATION

THE

KINDER-GARTEN:

rrf JrirhFa jugate

AND THEIR BEARING ON

THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN

ALSO

REMARKS ON THE

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

BY

EMILY SUIIUIEFF,

AUTHOR OF " INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION OS1 WOMEN."

SYRACUSE, N.Y.:
C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER.

LONDON: SWAN SONfrENSCHEIN & CO
1889.

PRINTED BY

HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

CONTENTS

Preface vii

FROBEL'S SYSTEM OP EDUCATION —

Sect. I. General Training for Little Children . . 1
IL Frbbel's Gifts 7

III. do. (continued) . . • .17

IV. Principles of Frobel's System ... 26
V. Frobel's System in relation to Ordinary Schools 36

VI. Frbbel's System in relation to Industrial

Training and the Life of the People . .43
VII. Frobel's Appeal to Women . . . .52

REMARKS ON THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN . .65
Explanation of term " Higher Education" . . .65

Essential Studies —

Physiology . . . . . , .68

Nursing and General Care of Health . . .70
Mental Philosophy and Application to Education 76
Social Economy ...... 85

Charities — Influence on Politics . .87

Subjects open to choice —

Literature 94

History 95

Science 96

APPENDIX . . . 100

PREFACE

short papers here given to the public were
originally published in the "Women's Education
Journal " in two distinct series, which are now re-
printed together, because they bear ultimately upon
the same important subject — the duty laid upon
women to fit themselves to be the educators of the
race. It were vain to lay down the Kinder-garten
System, if women are not ready to practice it ; the
philosophy of Frobel must remain a dead letter as
regards all practical influence on society, if women
are not capable of understanding and acting upon its
principles. The Kinder-garten System presents itself,
therefore, to those who are anxious to forward the
education of women under an aspect of twofold im-
portance— that which it ostensibly claims as a means
of developing childish faculty, and that which it indi-
rectly possesses by its imperative claim on the exercise
of the highest faculties in women. Family life, few
will deny, is the centre of national welfare; and Nature
herself has placed women as the central power of
family life. Any wide, moral, and intellectual reform
must then begin here. We touch the surface only by
all educational labour that leaves out of sight the asso-

Viii PREFACE

ciations of home, and these are moulded by women.
"NYe touch one side of human nature only, and that
which least effects the will, and therefore least concerns
action, when we stimulate the intellect, and make no
appeal to the heart or the imagination ; and this wide
region, too much neglected by educators, is that where-
in women exercise their most powerful sway. The
latter will be one-sided also, and therefore more or
less fraught with danger, till moral, intellectual, and
aesthetic culture, proceeding hand in hand, have re-
stored the due balance in the feminine mind. Har-
monious development is what the welfare of society
as of the individual demands, but society cannot attain
this advantage until the effects of the long neglect of
women's mental capacity has been recognised and
remedied.

The more direct importance of the Kinder-garten as
training young children, is better appreciated than its
influence over the education of women ; yet even this
is v^ry imperfectly reno^nised, it is too generally an
ignorant and half mistaken view that is taken of its
value. It is very commonly considered as a system
of mere childish amusements, or means of keeping
troublesome little hands and feet quiet; or, at best,
as a way of teaching something, before the children
are old enough to learn to read. Its intrinsic value
as the most philosophical system of real education^rhat
is, of drawing out the faculties of the child, of following

PREFACE IX

step by step Nature's own order of development, and
step by step also cultivating the use of all the instru-
ments by which knowledge shall hereafter be gained,
and active life be directed— this, the great power of
Frobel's method, is as yet apprehended by few in
England ; and it is for this reason that in the following
papers I have sought to dwell more on principles than
on practice. I am well aware that of the many imper-
fections of this little book, the most imperfect part is
that relating to the various games and exercises. It is
so impossible to make this really good without illustra-
tions, that I have attempted no more than what was
necessary to make principles intelligible.

Next to my desire to bring out the theory of Frobel's
method, has been that of showing how this early train-
ing can be carried on gradually to the ordinary book
learning of later schools, and what influence it will
have on the pupil's aptitude for the latter. Especially
would I dwell upon the fact of the valuable amount of
school time saved by the early training of the pupil's
faculties in the right diiection, the difference it must
make to corne to work with working habits ready
formed, with senses and hands trained to accuracy and
delicacy; instead of coming, as children usually do,
with some small scraps of book learning acquired by
rote, but without the least idea of exercising their own
intelligence. What is required is to rouse mothers to
the importance of giving this preparation, and gradu-

b

X PREFACE

ally to urge schools to exact it. Teachers will probably
not be slow to do so when once they have recognised
the assistance thus given to their own labour. The
commonest complaint from all schools is of the state of
unfitness in which the children are sent to them. One
of the most constant arguments used in favour of better
education for women has been the schoolmaster's argu-
ment, that if mothers could educate their children
before school-time, the work of school would be very
different from what it is.

The additions made to the sections on Higher Edu-
cation for Women are considerable, because the ex-
tremely narrow limits of the Journal at the time they
were first written had made brevity a principal con-
sideration. An outline only of the subject can be pre-
sented even here, but I have endeavoured to make it
somewhat less imperfect.

EMILY SHIRREFF.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

TTTHEN the first edition of this little work was ex-
hausted, it became a question whether it snould
be allowed to drop out of print, or be in a great measure
re- written. Finally, I have thought it best to do neither,
but to republish it in its original form, with only a few
notes and corrections. My reasons for this course are
that,beingas regards the Kinder-garten, a simple abstract
of PRINCIPLES, these remain the same under any changed
aspect of the practical work. What is said of them to-
day remains true for ever, and that neglect of principles,
that preference for the superficial part of Kinder-garten
practice over the theory of education, on which it is
based, and from which it derives its value, is still one of
the most fatal hindrances to progress. Indeed, as
Kinder-gartens multiply, it becomes even more necessary
to repeat that in using Frobel's gifts, we do nothing, or
worse than nothing, unless we put into each exercise
Frobel's spirit and purpose.

The second part of the book, which refers to women's
mission in connection with infant education, admits in
like manner of little change, because there also general
principles are laid down. The reasons that make certain
studies valuable or imperative remain the same ; and the
appeal to women's right feeling in the matter is even
more pressing than before. For the evil caused by
women's ignorance of education, and of so many subjects
that are essential to the education, are more felt in pro-

Xll PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

portion as Frobel's System spreads, and we feel our de-
pendence on the assistance of mothers, which they are too
generally incapable of giving. Madame von MahrenbolU
speaks strongly of this deficiency as being the principal
cause of the slow progress of the Kinder-garten in Ger-
many. It is essentially mothers' work, because, however
good the mere teachers may be, home co-operation is
absolutely indispensable.

The appendix referring to hindrances in the work of
the Frobel Society I have also decided to leave as it was,
because, although our position as a Society is different
now from what it was when these remarks were written,
we still have to bear in mind many of the same difficul-
ties that met us at first, and still need to remember
that a high standard, and united efforts, are the first re-
quisites for success. The Society has founded a training
college, which, under the able direction of Miss Bishop,
will, we trust, do much to further our progress. We
have persevered in the system of independent examina-
tions, and adhere strongly to this principle ; but what
we need more than any external measures, is the earnest
conviction that we are engaged in a great work for
humanity, one calling for energy and self-devotion,
and before which all petty jealousies and separate
interests cannot dare to lift their heads.

EMILY SHIKREFF.

May 1880.

UNIVERSITY

FKOBEL'S SYSTEM OF EDUCATION

SECTION I.

General Training for Little Children

THERE has for some years been a strong feeling in Ger-
many of the need of reform in their whole system of
national Education. Instruction had reached a point
that was the envy of other nations, but real education
kept no pace with the culture of the intellect alone.
The foremost thinkers on this matter felt that the
desired progress must be the result of more harmonious
development of the whole nature, and that to be effectual
it must begin in early childhood, and be cared for alike
in all classes of the nation. Accordingly, the society
established for the reform of education, the Allgemeine
Erziehungsverein, has made it the principal object of
its exertions to spread Kinder-garten schools over the
country and to establish Normal Schools for teachers of
the system. In England a similar movement has taken
place. The Women's Education Union, by its strenuous
work of reform, has helped to make the need of better
early training felt ; and the Frobel Society founded
somewhat later, and which has been in close connection,

A

2 GENERAL TKAINING [SEC. L

with the Union, has had for its object to promote that
early training through the Kinder-garten system. Sucn
reforms have been found to be very difficult in Germany ;
but they are still more so in England, where philosophical
principles of education are seldom appealed to, where
every man who has knowledge is supposed competent to
teach, and where teaching and educating are so com-
monly used as equivalent terms, that so-called educa-
tional discussions rarely go beyond the subject-matter
and extent of knowledge to be imparted at a given time,
and for a given purpose. One of the many evil con-
sequences of this confusion is that several years are
wasted beyond recall ; since what is nominally called
education begins at an age when real education should
already have been placed upon a secure basis. The work
of the true educator is to draw out all the latent capa-
bilities of the human creature, to form habits and
associations, and to discipline the will; the work of
ordinary teachers begins only when the will has already
acquired strength and bias, when habits and associations,
good or bad, are already partly formed by the mere
force of circumstances, when the mental faculty has
already been exercised in some measure, and probably
in a wrong direction. The teacher (if he has any
educating insight or purpose at all) is likely to find
that he has as much to undo as to do. He soon learns
by sad experience the value of those seven or eight
years of a child's life that have been ignorantly wasted
or misused.

Frobel was not the first to uphold the importance of
early education — all philosophical writers on the subject
have done the same ; but he has given, in the Kinder-

SEC. I.] FOR LITTLE CHILDREN 3

garten method, a detailed application of the scientific
principles he laid down, and established a system which
takes the child from the cradle, and carries him through
progressive periods of physical and mental development.
Such a system requires, even for its partial application,
the training of a very large number of female teachers ;
but for its application, as a means of national reform, it
would require that mothers should be educated for their
sacred office — that women generally should be taught
to consider that intelligent care of the young is the
first and most important work for which they need to
fit themselves. Education in the nursery, and for some
years after leaving it, is inevitably women's work ; but
in popular estimation mere women's work must be insig-
nificant, and thus the most vicious of all the circles in
which we have been wont to turn, has remained from
generation to generation unbroken. Early education
was neglected because the mothers to whom it belonged
were unfit for the task ; and women's education was
neglected because no one could see that they had any
work to do that required mental culture. And in spite
of the endless discussions of the present day, the real
interest in some quarters, the apparent interest in society
generally, we are still turning round and round that
same point, we are still elaborately seeking reasons
why women should be allowed the privilege of mental
draining, and we are still wasting the first years of child-
life, and adding hopelessly to the task of later instruc-
tors, because women have not that requisite training.
Yet in no one thing in the whole order of the universe
has nature spoken more strongly and directly than in
this. She makes it impossible for us to alter or modify

4 GENERAL TRAINING [SEC. I;

her law. Do what we will, women must mould infant
life and give the first direction to feeling and intelli-
gence ; all we can manage in opposition is to prevent
them from consciously educating the child with a dis-
tinct and worthy purpose, and this we have, generally
speaking, effectually done ; the teaching of nature has
been quite powerless against the vis inertiw of the two
facts mentioned above — contempt for women's work,
and ignorance of the true human purpose of education.

For proof of the ignorance we need not confine our
observation to the nursery. Our Universities and our
National Schools alike will furnish it abundantly. We
are very apt, from the height of our national pride, to
look down upou the benighted nations of the South ;
but if our people are not altogether in the same state
of ignorance, it is Protestantism, not value for human
culture, that has rescued them. Of all the indirect
benefits conferred on us by the theory of liberty of con-
science— that sent every man to ground his own faith on
the Bible — the greatest perhaps has been the necessity
thereby imposed of teaching the people to read it.
Popular education, and in great measure that of
women, had till of late years no other motive or purpose.
But if the religious duty of enabling every one to read
the Bible became gradually accepted, the religious duty
of putting every human being in possession of the
faculties bestowed by God has not yet been clearly
recognised; and the ignorance of all classes in the
community, to whom knowledge does not represent
profit or advancement, has been the natural consequence.

Nothing, perhaps, would tend to alter popular views
on this subject so much as the working and example of

SEC. I.] FOR LITTLE CHILDREN 5

Kinder-garten schools. In them Frobel's system is
minutely applied to the development of infant capacity^
I feel convinced that the practical illustration of great
principles thus given, the philosophical connection be-
tween all parts of the system, the results of rational
training manifested in the difference between Kinder-
garten pupils and other children of the same age when
they meet together in more advanced schools, will
more than anything else tend to prove to the reluctant
public that education has a scientific basis and a real
human purpose absolutely distinct from all questions
of rewards, examinations, or advancement. Yet we have
had such schools among us for years. In London, in
Manchester, in Dublin — not to mention other places —
there are excellent Kinder-garten institutions ; but as
regards influencing public opinion, scarcely anything
has been done. Doubtless through their means many
persons have been converted to the system, but it has
not been sufficiently discussed, or tho principles on
which it rests sufficiently expounded, to make it clear
to the public on what grounds these schools peculiarly
claim our attention.* It is more than probable that
many of the parents who have themselves acknowledged
the benefit derived by their own children from Kinder-
garten training, have referred it rather to this or that
particular management or influence than to the legiti-
mate effect of sound theory methodically worked out.
The belief in particular facts and persons is so simple —
and so English — Awhile faith in wide principles is so
alien to our habits of thought, that I could well imagine
schools of this kind obtaining recognised success with-
* See Appendix

GENERAL TRAINING

[SEC. I.

out attention being roused to the scientific cause of that
success.

To the English public generally the Kinder-garten
system, so far as it is known at all, is represented by the
games which, being sold in inviting-looking boxes, have
been purchased for nursery amusement, or perhaps as
an introduction to ordinary object-lessons. These games,
however, while they are doubtless a source of some
amusement to the children in school, are also the tools,
so to speak, to aid the teacher in her labours. Accuracy,
observation, the first principles of reasoning, are taught
by means of these simple toys, while nicety and dex-
terity of handling, and pleasure in active exertion, are
trained by every exercise. And even were no infor-
mation of much value gained at the same time, let any
teacher say what difference in later school .studies it
would make if all children came to them ready pro-
vided with such habits. Nor is the training of this
system solely, or even principally, directed to facilitate
the acquisition of knowledge ; it takes the child's whole
nature, aiding its expansion physically and morally, as
well as intellectually. The rhythmical movements, the
dancing and singing games, are not only good for health,
as mere exercise — they make the limbs supple, and
improve both eye and ear. Moral training is carried
on through the habit of strict obedience, under a gentle
law ever referring to the will of God, who has placed
helpless infancy under that loving care which represents
His ceaseless love for all His creatures. And by direct-
ing observation to order and beauty in external things,
and in human conduct as manifestations of God's rule
and presence throughout the world, religious and moral

SEC. I.] FOR LITTLE CHILDREN 7

associations are formed, which, long before the age when
aiiy catechism would be intelligible, prepare the mind
for the reception of all that is highest in Christianity
or in philosophy.

This seems, perhaps, to claim much for a system of
nursery training ; but the system being founded on
principles deduced from a careful study of human nature,
it is evident that they must, if true, contain the germ of
the highest development. The Kinder-garten aims in
no way at making infant prodigies, but it aims success-
fully at putting the little child in possession of every
faculty it is capable of using ; at bringing him forward,
as far as his puny strength will allow, -orrirnes which
he will never need to forsake ; at teaching, within his
narrow range, what he will never have to unlearn ; and
at giving him the wish to learn, and the power of teach-
ing himself. YWe may safely anticipate that children so
trained will make better use than others of all higher
means of instruction in later years, and make fewer
mistakes in judgment and in action ; in other words,
that they will have made more progress towards that
which is the true aim of life, self-improvement and
power of working for the service of others.

SECTION II.

FrobeVs Gifts

I HAVE said that the games which play so important a
part in Frobel's system are often under-valued, and all
benefit lost, by their being treated as mere toys, or at
best as the means of giving common object-lessons.

8 FKOBEL'S GIFTS [SEC n.

Nothing can be further from the inventor's purpose.
According to that they stand as ' necessarily connected
links.' They are not toys merely, because they ars in-
tended for instruction ; they are not for lessons only,
since they are meant as games ; they combine both
characters, and are designed to stimulate and guide the
natural activity of the child in both directions. To fuse
into one lesson work and play is the purpose of the
Kinder-garten, and this fusion ' becomes possible only
when the objects with which the child plays allow room
for mental and bodily activity.' In addition to the dis-
jointed use of what was given as a whole, the further
mistake is generally made of placing the games in the
hands of some nursery governess, or other person, who
has never heard of Frobel's system, probably has never
been taught that nursery education requires any system
at all, and the end is failure, sweetened by contempt for
Frobel's method, the just principles of which have been
neglected or unknown.

It may be useful, therefore, to give some description
of the ' gifts ' (as these peculiar toys are called), and
of the purpose they are destined to serve, before entering
further into the exposition of Frobel's theory, and like-
wise to speak of the more active games, without which
the system of combined physical and mental development
would be utterly incomplete. -[These games consist of
songs and dancing, or rather of rhythmical movements,
timed or regulated by song, and are shared in by all the
children before they are of an age to employ themselves
actively in any work of skill, whether in class or garden,
or to practice real gymnastic exercises. It is almost
impossible by mere description to convey a correct notion

SEC. ii.] FROBEL'S GIFTS 9

of these play-dances. The little songs of which they
are in a manner the accompaniment mostly tell some
story, or describe some action, something relating to the
visible world — to bird, or beast, or plant, or change of
seasons, to the relations or affections familiar to the
children, or some manual work of which they can mimic
the action. Many of these songs have been translated
into English,* and the exercises, which afford unfailing
delight to the children, can be seen by any visitor to a
Kinder-gar ten.

Something of the same kind is practised in every
infant-school. There, also, sedentary work is varied by
quick motion and singing; but the Kinder-garten dancing,
as it is called, is at once more free and more rhythmical.
A great variety of movements are executed in time
and order ; the children do not merely walk to music,
but perform various actions which bring each limb in
turn into exercise, and which, by requiring a great
variety of attitudes, give suppleness as well as strength
to the muscles. If I wished to describe in a few words
the difference between the two, I might say that infant-
school children are preparing to learn drill, and Kinder-
garten children training for choric dancing. Some of
the most important objects (in addition to the mere
exercise), such as regularity, simultaneous movement,
etc., are common to both, but the latter begin also to
learn that sense of harmony and beauty which is never
lost sight of in any part of Frobel's system.

* Mrs Berry and Mde. Michaelis have published two series of songs
partly translated, partly adapted, and a few original, with the music.
Miss Heerwart has also published, under the title of ' ' Music for the
Kinder-garten," another collection of the same kind.

FROBEL'S GIFTS

[SEC. ii.

We come now to the sedentary games, and will take
them in order.

The first gift is the ball. — Each child in the class is
provided with one ; they are all of the same size, and
have a short string attached by which they may be
suspended, but they are of different colours. The first
purpose of giving the ball, as with every other object
successively presented, is to draw the child's attention
to all the obvious peculiarities that distinguish it from
other surrounding objects, whether in form, in colour, in
texture, or in properties — that is, whether hard or soft,
fragile or elastic, etc.; and the ball is first selected on
account of the simplicity of the spherical form making
a single impression, requiring therefore no combined
view of different lines and surfaces. The game or
exercise consists of a series of movements executed
with the ball, which is now raised, now lowered, placed
to the right, then to the left, passed from one hand to
the other, from one child to the "other, noting the effect
of each change in relation to the other objects and
positions, the movements now quicker, now slower,
being always executed by word of command, promptly,
exactly, and together, — things which some may smile at
as part of a school lesson, but which are not thought
unimportant on the parade-ground of a regiment. At
the beginning and ending of each game, whether in
opening the box that contains the ' gift,' in taking out
the objects, in passing them along from one to another,
the same order and disciplined motion is exacted ; and,
besides the other results mentioned above, a sense of
fellowship is created from acting together ; and the
gentleness enforced by the teacher, and naturally aided

SEC. IL] FEOBEL'S GIFTS 11

'6y the order and rhythm, excludes all outward token of
rude or unkind feeling, and thus tends to foster the
opposite, to create an association of pleasure with kind
and gentle intercourse. It may be observed here, that
moral influence, direct or indirect, is always present in
this system, and the repression of selfishness is a lead-
ing object. Nothing in the child's whole training is for
one alone; there is emulation, but no competition for
rewards, and the children's temper is saved from irrita-
tion by the absence of all that souring influence that
comes from impotent effort and straining over solitary
tasks.

The second gift consists of a sphere, a cube, and
a cylinder. — By means of these the children's natural
power of observation is drawn out to discover for them-
selves the difference between these forms and the various
ways in which they could be used, etc. We have no
longer the simple perception awakened by the ball, but
sides, surfaces, lines, and circumference; and when
these are clearly distinguished, the right terms for them
are always given, so that when any fact connected with
these figures is accurately apprehended, it is also accu-
rately labelled in the child's memory, becoming thus of
easy reference hereafter, whether in the advanced series
of this peculiar instruction, or in approaching the stud}7"
of geometry. There is this peculiarity in these games,
though intended for such young children (from three to
seven generally), there is no attempt to adapt the truths
of science to childish apprehension, expressed in childish
language ; the whole aim is to direct infant observation,
to perceive, and budding intelligence to seize the true
aspects and relations of such objects as are presented to

12 FROBEL'S GIFTS J.SEC.II]

them, and at onee to acquire the familiar use of the
right terms, which must be learned whenever real study
begins.

In the use of this second gift we, however, enter upon
the ground in which Frobel's system achieves the
largest measure of actual instruction in the ordinary
sense. The successive series of exercises with the cube,
the sphere, and the cylinder, aided later by other * gifts'
and instruments of work, impart as they go on an
accurate and familiar acquaintance with the facts and
relations on which geometrical truths are founded, and
some of the more obvious conclusions are arrived at by
a process which makes them henceforth a part of the
child's own experience. The advantage so gained in
facilitating later study is very great, but far greater is
the educational value of the training which has made
accurate observation, reasoning from one fact to another,
and the perception of necessary relations habitual. The
boy who carries such habits to school will be among
his fellows like the workman who is familiar with his
tools, compared to the novice who is learning their
names.

The third gift is a ciibe, composed of eight smaller
cubes. — The principal object of the exercise with this is
to lead the child to distinguish partefrom the whole, to
observe the distribution of parts, to count them, and to
discover modes of construction with the pieces he
possesses. The durable lessons learnt? are of arithmetic
and of symmetry ; the former carried by simple steps
up to fractions, the latter to whatever figures can be
constructed with the little cubes alone. The child does
not learn a single rule of arithmetic till he has dis-

SEC. IL] FROBEL'S GIFTS 13

covered the sense of it practically ; he performs, accord-
ing to order, certain operations with the objects before
him, divides his little heap, adds, subtracts, and puts
together again, and, lo ! a certain result is clear before
him; some brief formula may then be given, and he
himself perceives that his memory of what he has done,
and his power of doimg exactly the same thing again, is
aided by putting the result into words. The number of
figures that may be constructed with the little cubes is
greater than we -should imagine till we see them before
us. The most familiar objects are naturally chosen — a
table, a bench, a door, a window, a flight of steps ; but
each furnishes the teacher with abundant means for
leading the child to fresh observation, to the perception
of similarities and differences, analogies and contrasts, of
symmetry, with its accompanying sense of completeness,
or of the want of symmetry, with its discordant effect.
The lesson, if so it may be called, is mingled with what-
ever of narrative or of natural history the objects may
suggest to the teacher. 'The child,' as Madame Pape
Carpentier* remarks, in speaking of such lessons, 'is
not amused, but he is interested/ and he is interested
because his own mental activity is fully drawn out
without fatigue. He has no natural aversion to, and

* See the admirable lectures delivered by. this lady at the Sorbonne
in 1867, when the Government, at the time of the Exhibition, sum-
moned the schoolmasters from all parts of France to attend the Con-
ferences on Education, in which many of the leading professors took
part. Madame Carpentier had been requested to give her views on the
application to schools generally of the method she used in the Salles
d'Asile, which is founded on Frobel's principles. Her exposition was
thought so good, that she was requested to continue it in a second, and
again in a third lecture.

14 FKOBEL'S GIFTS [SEC. IL

no incapacity for thought, as we may daily learn from
the ' why ?' with which he meets each new event in his
experience ; but he can think only about facts pre-
sented to his observation, not about words or remote
action, of which he is unable to form a conception.

After each lesson, the children build according to
their own fancy, emulating each other in their con-
structions, sometimes imitating some familiar object,
sometimes forming mere symmetrical figures, as they
happen to take more pleasure in one or the other, it
matters not which, so long as originality and activity
are both brought into play. ' Want of originality, in
the highest sense of the word, among men is principally
caused (says one of the best writers on Frobel's sys-
tem*) by the hindrances that keep down the early
active tendencies of children, or at least give them no
assistance/ And in another place she remarks, with
equal truth, ' By independent action we prepare inde-
pendent though t.'-f In the Kinder-garten such pre-
paration begins with the dawn of intelligence, and
continues long enough to make the association of plea-
sure with the exercise of mental activity too strong to
be easily broken.

The fourth gift is also a cube of equal dimensions
with the former one, but subdivided into eight oblong
pieces (or bricks, as the children call them), the length
of each being twice its breadth, and the breadth twice
its thickness. With these begins a new series of obser-

* B. Von Marenholtz Bulo\v, Die Arbeit und die neue Erziehung,
p. lo».

t Idem, p. 181.

SEC. ii.] FROBEL'S GIFTS 15

vations of lines and surfaces. The cube itself is familiar
to the child, but the child finds that the pieces of which
it is composed are different from the former ones. In
those all the sides were alike in shape and size ; here
they vary, and he has new discoveries to make, and new
names to learn in consequence. The method and the
class of observations in this game naturally follow the
same course as in the last, and the amusing work of
construction follows in the same manner; first under
dictation, and with commentaries by the teachers, and
afterwards freely, according to each child's fancy. The
same mode of instruction is followed with the fifth and
sixth gifts, which in like manner are cubes, of the same
size as the former ones, but differently subdivided, and
with some pieces cut diagonally, so as to form triangular
blocks introducing acute angles, and a whole new series
of observations. Thus the child acquires almost insen-
sibly more and more acquaintance with different lines
and figures, and their relations to each other, laying
the foundation for future study of geometry, which is
further facilitated by his becoming familiar with the
correct terms for all he deals with.

The next things we find used in two successive play-
lessons are, first, small sticks, and, secondly, thin laths,
which I mention together, as being very similar in use.
The sticks are of 10 centimetres (somewhat more than
3J inches), the laths of 25 centimetres (rather more
than 10 inches) in length. As I, however, have not
space to enter into the detail of the lessons given by
means of these new toys, it must suffice to say that they
serve to continue the arithmetical instruction, but still
more the construction of geometrical figures begun with

16

FEOBEL'S GIFTS

[SEC. ii.

the cubes, leading the child to discover further facts,
and reach further conclusions.

Up to this time solids and surfaces have been pre-
sented to his observation ; now the sticks and laths
represent lines, and he learns to form the outline of
figures.* He now constructs for himself the angles
which before were given to him by the cubes, and
proceeds by laying the sticks in this direction or in
that, to form other angles hitherto unknown, and
to observe the points that distinguish them from the
former class, their relations to the latter and to each
other, etc. ; and still, at each step, he has got firm
hold of a fact, and has learnt the right designation
for it.

The laths being flexible, and capable, therefore, of
being interlaced, the figures constructed with them are
in a measure fixed, and can be lifted from the table:
the child thus learns to recognise the same forms in
a different plane. Greater variety also is now possible.
Triangles had been made with the little sticks ; those
made with the laths can be interlaced ; lozenges in the
same manner; figures with double lines joining and
interlacing at the angles offer another series of changes
— all pleasing by their symmetry, and exciting the fancy
of the children to try and produce some new combina-
tion of their own. A glance at the plates in Madame

* For what reason the name of ' gifts ' has been given to the ob-
jects above described, and not to those used in the further series of
play-lessons, I do not know ; but the difference is a merely technical
one, and only worth noting in order that persons wishing to pur-
chase the objects required for Kinder-garten instruction should not be
misled.

SEC. ii.] FROBEL'S GIFTS 17

Delon's book * would astonish most persons new to the
method, by the extraordinary variety that these simple
means can produce. It will be still more striking when
we come to the further exercises I have yet to describe.

SECTION III

FrobeVs Gifts — continued.

WITHOUT the assistance of diagrams it is very difficult
to make any method of instruction in the Kinder-
garten even fairly intelligible ; still, I believe some
description of this kind to be so essential towards
making the principles of the method clear to those
who have no previous acquaintance with Kinder-garten
schools, that I must still trust to my reader's patience,
and pursue the description through the remaining por-
tions of the class teaching.

All the objects hitherto described as instruments of
instruction, except the ball and cylinder, have dealt
with straight lines, and the figures formed by those
lines. We have the ' gifts ' of solids, such as cubes,
and bricks ; then the games with sticks and laths, for
constructing interlinear figures; after these begin a
series of exercises upon curved lines, and these are

* Methode Intuitive, par Mde. Fanny Ch. Delon. This book gives
an admirable account of the practical system, though rejecting some
of Frb'Wt's philosophical views. The plates are invaluable in making
the operations intelligible, and are remarkably full and clear.

B

tOBEL'S GIFTS

SEC. III.

conducted by means of small metal rings and portions
of rings. Besides the new facts that are learnt in this
fresh field of observation, a complete new set of figures
may be produced, and the imitation of objects passes
from that of things constructed by human art, which
are mostly rectilinear, to that of natural objects, in
which curved lines in every possible variety prevail.
In the first exercise four rings are distributed to each
child, with the customary forms used in opening all the
other games. The teacher begins by making some
remarks on the rings themselves — their size, weight,
the metal they are made of; and then the lesson turns
on their peculiar form, which the children learn is to
be called a ' circle.' This is recognised as having been
seen before in the base of the cylinder, but the ring
gives only the outline or circumference. The circles
now in use are equal to each other ; this is shown by
laying one upon the other ; then they are laid side by
side in actual contact, and an important fact is dis-
covered by the children, namely, that the circles, if not
allowed to cross, can touch each other in one point
only.

Three other exercises follow successively, in which
circles, semicircles, and various segments of circles, are
used. Sometimes the circumference is to be recon-
structed with the various parts, sometimes the seg-
ments are to be arranged so that lines of different
curves, whether broken or continuous, should be pro-
duced. Now they are placed side by side, and it is
seen that, as with the circles, the segments also can
touch at one point only ; then again they are crossed,
and it is manifest that while any portions of a circle

SEC. in.] FROBEL'S GIFTS 19

may be so placed as to intersect each other in one
point only, circles, if crossed one over the other, must
have two points of intersection.

Such is the kind of instruction conveyed in these
exercises; but the important thing to consider is the
method, which remains the same throughout, not teach
ing, in the ordinary sense, but leading the children to
learn — exciting their interest till they wish to observe,
compare, and note results for themselves ; when some
new thing is to be learnt, so arranging the lesson that
it shall bring the fact to view in such a manner as will
lead the child to observe it himself. It thus becomes
his own discovery, and precious to him henceforth as
nothing merely committed to his memory will ever be.
The child is placed by the teacher in such a relation to
external objects, that he naturally questions them; he
goes through the process of self-education, but is saved
from the mistakes of the self-educated by walking un-
consciously in the groove carefully prepared for him.

It is evident that with the addition of circles and
other curved lines, the variety of symmetrical figures
that can be constructed is immensely increased. It is
impossible without plates to give any idea of what that
A7ariety really is, and what the beauty of the designs
produced by the simple juxtaposition and interlacing of
curves. When we look at some of the plates in such a
work as Mde. Delon's, and learn that the patterns given
were the independent invention of little children under
eight years of age, we gain a truer idea than we other-
wise could do of the extent to which this system de-
velopes the sense of beauty, and the feeling of harmony
and symmetry as essential to beauty ; and this is not

20

FROBEL'S GIFTS

[SEC.

merely the foundation of all artistic creation in its high-
est, as in 'its lowest forms, but of artistic enjoyment,
adding to the pleasure of life in the cottage as in the
palace, wherever the forms and tints of nature speak to
the imagination and the heart of man.

The rings end the series of exercises of this kind. In
Ad the games hitherto described, from the ball to the
circles, and segments of circles, the child has had ready-
-made objects furnished to him, which he could p?.u,ce or
•displace, but not otherwise alter; this, howevei, is but
one portion of Kinder-garten instruction, which alms at
training manual dexterity and love of active work, no
less than at awakening and directing intelligence.
Frobel is never weary of repeating that man must not
only knoiv but produce ; not only think but work ; and
that the capacity for work must be trained in early
childhood, side by side with the observing and appre-
hending faculty, and before the memory is burdened
with words and symbols. I have, for the sake of con-
venience, gone through the series of games without in-
terruption, but the various kinds of work are also taught
almost from the beginning, and the facts learnt in play-
ing with the sticks and laths, and in forming figures
with them, are applied in working a great variety of
patterns.

The first work to be learnt is plaiting. This is done
with strips of paper, and the art consists in the regu-
larity and neatness it requires, both of which are difficult
to attain by little uncertain fingers hitherto ignorant of
•purpose.

Weaving, which follows next, is also done with strips
of paper laced in and out through other strips fastened

SEC. in.] FROBEL'S GIFTS 21

on a little frame. Different coloured papers aie gene-
rally used, and a pattern is given to the child till he
can make one for himself. Folding and cutting out
complete the series, and are begun about the same time
as the latter games. The advantage of this sort of hand
exercise over needlework is manifold — they follow in
the same direction as the games, illustrate in some
measure the same principles, they lead on to drawing,
which is a very important part of the subsequent work.
Needlework is confined to girls, while boys in ordinary
schools learn no manual art till they are fit to hold a
pen or a pencil; and, lastly, they offer variety and a
certain amount of beauty which please and interest the
children, while nothing can enliven the dulness of the
hem or the seam. The latter will not, however, lose in
the long run, for the dexterity, neatness, and accuracy
of hand acquired in the various operations enumerated
aV te, and followed by drawing, will make needlework
very easy to learn hereafter.

I cannot here enter into more detail concerning these
various forms of work, which are, in fact, partly exer-
cises of mere manipulation, partly opportunities for
displaying fancy. Cutting-out, which is the latest, is
by far the most difficult, and gives for the first time to
+he child the use of a tool, the delicate handling of
which is the most important thing to be learnt. Fold-
ing is less difficult and less artistic in its results, but
it affords the opportunity of continuing the elementary
geometrical instruction begun in the various games.
By folding squares of paper in different ways, but
always with strict attention to accuracy in bringing the
edges exactly together, the lines produced divide and

22 FKOBEL'S GIFTS [SEC. m.

subdivide the original space, forming figures of different
shapes and dimensions; or they intersect each other,
and form angles of various kinds. Some of these are
familiar in the games with cubes or sticks, and the
proper designations of any new figures are learnt with-
out trouble ; since a child can remember the names of
right or acute angles, of squares or triangles just as
easily as those of any familiar objects around him, so
long as they have been made equally obvious, and have
been equally the objects of his own observation and
experience. It is curious to hear a class of little
children so taught, eagerly pointing out in surrounding
furniture or decoration of the room, which are the right
or the acute angles, or which the horizontal, perpendi-
cular, or oblique lines, showing that they have accu-
rately retained the names which they have learned, one
by one, in order to register their own observations.
Perfectly familiar with the thing, they have felt the
convenience of being able to refer to it.

In the course of his folding, the child also discovers
by the result of his own observation the important fact
that the angles formed at one point of intersection of
two or more lines must be four right angles, or equal
to four right angles; and the fact so acquired is to him
a self-evident truth. Such empirical knowledge may
be an improper mode of approaching exact science, but
it is the only mode possible in childhood, and it will
be found no small advantage later that the intelligence
has learnt to view such facts as practical truths. What
has been clearly and indelibly fixed in the mind by
the one method, will far more readily be accepted on
scientific grounds when the age for scientific

SEC. m.] FKOBEL'S GIFTS 23

is come. After some manual skill, and some accuracy
of eye and touch, have been acquired, the first steps
are made towards learning to draw. ' Frobel required
from every educated person a certain degree of skill in
drawing, for the purpose of ensuring accurate percep-
tion of objects, and likewise to make use of plastic art
as a means of cultivation, and to give the capacity for
art enjoyment even to those who possess no power
themselves. He considered it as highly important that
a child should acquire some facility in drawing before
he learns to read or write, since the representation of
actual things should precede the representation of signs
and words/* This is a peculiar view, but those who
might dispute the question of precedence will hardly
deny that drawing has never yet been made use of in
education as it might be ; that a study which, besides
all its practical advantages, affords the most admirable
means of training accuracy of observation, and truth
of reproduction, of cultivating at once the senses and
the most valuable mental habits, has been strangely
neglected. ' Accurate and well-cultivated senses lead,'
says the author just quoted, ' to accurate perception
and comparison, and thus the elements of just thought
are prepared/ The reason why children seldom learn
to think from books is that the ideas presented take
no hold of their minds. It would be curious to inquire
how much of the loose thinking, the hazy perception
of truth, which characterise the majority of even the
educated portion of mankind, might be traced back to

* Die Arbeit und die neue Erziehung, Baronin von Marenholtz
Bulow, p. 133.

24 FKOBEL'S GIFTS [SEC. in.

the absence of any definite impressions made in child-
hood in connection with the instruction given to them.
They are occupied with words, and words are vague
and often void of meaning to them. Outside the
school-room they acquire definite impressions, but they
are acquired at random, and may be wholly wanting
in accuracy. They will, however, exercise more influ-
ence than what is learnt at school, for the instruction
there given is quite apart from any practical region, and
has no solid foundation in observation or experience.

Kinder-garten drawing-lessons begin in the humblest
manner ; the first attempt, before the little fingers are
able to guide a pencil, is made by forming the outline
of figures with a succession of holes pricked along ruled
paper, or over a pattern ; the difficulty to be sur-
mounted being that of making the holes at equal dis-
te>™ce and of equal size. This kind of work is carried
on in various manners, but need not detain us here ;
that which is a preparation for drawing is continued
till the hand is steady enough to use a pencil. As soon
as this point is attained, first a ruled slate, and then
ruled paper is used. The ruling, which is in regular
squares, has the advantage of saving the beginner from
gross errors till the steadier hand and eye can draw
correct lines, true both in direction and proportion.
When this is in some measure achieved, the pupils
begin to reproduce in drawing the same kind of geo-
metrical figures and symmetrical patterns which they
formerly constructed with the sticks, laths, or rings.
Not till eye and hand have been exercised in tracing
these outlines is drawing from objects attempted; and,
indeed, the little pupils of the real Kinder-garten rarely

SEC. in.] FROBEL'S GIFTS 25

can attain to that point ; it must be reserved, as more
advanced instruction is reserved by Frobel, for what
he called transition classes (vermittlung's Klasse), the
teaching in which is intended to bridge over the chasm
between the complete object lessons of the earlier
period and the comparatively abstract studies of later
schools.

Little, however, as the Kinder-garten pupils may
achieve in drawing, it is certain that a child who has
acquired command over his pencil, in whom the feeling
of symmetry and proportion has been early awakened,
and accuracy of observation daily trained and tested,
would join a drawing-class ready to profit at once by
the lessons of a good master, while his contemporaries
are slowly learning to use their untrained senses and
clumsy, unsteady fingers.

In Frobel's system, drawing, as I said before, pre-
cedes writing ; and writing so far precedes reading that
the pupil must be able to trace at once the symbols
which are given to him as representing certain sounds.
The methods of teaching to read and write differ in
different Kinder-gartens,* and would at any rate not
be easily made intelligible by mere description. The
pupils, generally, acquire these essential arts later than
other children ; but this is in Frobel's view an advan-
tage, since he thought little of what young children
can learn from books, and much of what they acquire
from the observation of nature and of surrounding
objects, and from the trained capacity for dealing with
outer things. All necessary acquisitions will subse-

* German method and English differ somewhat in this respect;

FEOBEL'S GIFTS [SEC. IIL

quently be made with comparative facility, in propor-
tion as the senses and general intelligence have been
cultivated. Ordinary schools made it their great busi-
ness to impart knowledge : the Kinder-garten aims at
developing the human being. It is only by the fitness
of their pupils in riper years for the manifold work of
life that the two systems can be fairly compared and
judged.

SECTION IV.
Principles of Frobel's System

I have given a rapid sketch of the principal games
and exercises of the Kinder-garten. Several others
might be mentioned, such as modelling, which was
greatly valued by Frobel, and which, strange as it
appears, is practised by little children and carried on
through the later classes, but I have said enough for
my purpose ; and will only add here a few words on the
care of animals and of a garden, which are introduced
whenever it is possible into Kinder-garten training, and
which have the advantage of combining in a peculiarly
happy manner bodily exercise and moral influence with
the cultivation of intelligence.

The children work themselves in their own patch of
ground, but, although allowed to follow freely their
own fancies, it is a natural result of the method pursued,
that they observe what is done around them, and desire
to understand and to imitate. They are led to observe
the peculiar nature of the plants or the animals that ara
given to their care, and the wish easily arises to leara

SEC. iv.] FROBEL'S PRINCIPLES 21}

how they should be tended, why such or such things
are good or bad, and to watch the changes that take
place, and which stimulate the desire to know more.
Nature seemed to Frobel the great book from which the
child must have its first lessons, as the man there learns
his highest wisdom; thus, amidst natural objects, be
exercises not only intelligence, but activity, steadiness
of purpose in giving the required care from day to
day, kindness, in practically ministering to the wants
or pleasure of feebler creatures, and in giving help to
companions if needed, and imagination and sense of
beauty in the daily admiration of bird and blossom, of
earth and sky, rising thence in wonder and thankful-
ness to the Father in heaven, who made and cares
for all.

I have said above that a fuller statement of details
is not needed for my purpose, which is simply to explain
enough to make Frobel's principles of education intel-
ligible. Nothing but long and careful study of the
system in actual working will give such knowledge of
details as would enable any person to practice the
peculiar mode of instruction, or to understand many
important points, such as the length of time to be
given to each exercise, or which of these may be used
simultaneously, The most elaborate descriptions would
only mislead the reader, if they induced him to fancy
that any book could supersede attendance in the
classes themselves. My purpose, I repeat, is merely to
supply illustrations of a method so deeply philosophical
in its principle, yet so simple in its outer aspect,
that its greatest danger is that of being treated as a
plaything.

28 FROBEL'S PRINCIPLES [SEC. iv.

Playthings in one sense, indeed, these 'gifts' of
Frobel's were intended to be, for he had watched the
childish instinct for play, and had recognised in that the
germ of man's activity, and hence through games' he
devised the means of drawing out that active instinct
into conscious exercise. He sought to guide and direct
the childish impulse, and that direction gives the play-
things their educational value. They are toys to the
child ; but instruments of serious mental discipline
to the teachers, who know that through them all, used
in their proper sequence, runs a distinct and gradually
unfolding purpose. The teacher who forgets this, and
allows the gifts to be toys in his hands also, destroys
their whole value. Nothing is more strongly insisted
on by Madame von Marenholtz Bulow, in the admirable
work I have before quoted, than the folly of those
who trifle with the order and purpose of the games.
Frobel's method is one whole founded on a great
principle : those who break it up and select parts for
their own use, show that they have never penetrated
below the surface.

Let us then consider what are the principles on
which this peculiar system of education rests. At its
root lies the deep conviction of the religious duty of
training to full and harmonious development all the
faculties, bodily and mental, with whicb ±ka child is
endowed by nature ; hence its progress is like organic
growth, rather than the thing of rules and conven-
tionalities that education is too generally suffered to be.

It may in general terms be described as an inward
method, in contrast with ordinary methods which are
mostly outward. The latter treat a child as a creature

SEC. iv.] FROBEL' s PRINCIPLES 29

who is to be made to do and to learn such and such
things according to set rules; the former views each
child as a creature of indefinite capability for doing and
learning, but whose owi »stincts and desires must be
turned towards the things we deem desirable. The
ordinary educator has a standard of attainment before
his eyes which his pupils must reach ; Frobel also has
a standard, not of attainment for a given age, but of
full and perfect development of humanity ; and he
studies the tendencies of childhood, and the ap itudes
of each child, in order to bend his efforts towafdv» draw
ing them out and giving them a right direction. And
the same with moral training ; the one orders conduct,
the other cultivates motives ; the one teaches cate-
chisms to little children, the other opens their eyes to
see beauty and goodness, and leads the heart to God.
The one uses habit, the great power of education, as an
outward constraint, the other as an inward regulator;
the one hates a lie as much as the other, but Frobel
brings intellectual habits and associations to aid the
moral precept, and makes clearness and accuracy so
essential to the child's daily enjoyment of his games
and occupations, that all the byways to untruth, such
as exaggeration, confusedness of mind, inaccuracy of
speech, are cut off. As far as the child's horizon
extends, he sees clearly and speaks plainly, and this
atmosphere of intellectual truth in which he lives is
favourable to the growth of moral rectitude.

It is common to look upon the Kinder-garten as
merely another form of the infant-school, — a better
system of teaching little children ; it is this, but it is
much more ; it is the first step in a wide connected

30 FROBEL'S PRINCIPLES [SEC. rv.

system of education, the first working of principles
which continue to work throughout childhood and
youth till the educator has finished his task, and
resigns it to the hands of those whom he has led to
consider self-culture a task that closes only when the
final close falls upon all earthly endeavour. This
vastness of purpose, contrasted with the narrow limits
of an infant-school, increases the difficulty of explain-
ing the Kinder-garten system ; its practical method
is for little children, but every educational aim points
beyond them to the period when fuller knowledge may
be sought, and fuller development of faculty becomes
possible.

It is because Frobel's system is one of development
and direction, rather than of teaching in the ordinary
sense, that he begins his study of child-nature at such
an early period. The first dawn of intelligence, the
first active tendencies and desires must be watched and
tended, and thus education begins not in the Kinder-
garten even, but in the nursery. Frobel is not intent
upon giving, but upon drawing out, all that lies in
germ in the infant nature. He does not believe that
education can do more than aid and direct the natural
development and provide the right food for the mental
growth ; but he affirms that this work of unfolding and
directing is alone education, and that consequently if
the infant years are wasted, if the budding powers, the
first desires and active instincts of the young creature
are left undirected, the good or the evil fruit will hence-
forth depend on circumstances mostly beyond the edu-
cator's control. His system of early training does, as
we have seen, lead to no insignificant progress in mere

SEC. rv.] FROBEL'S PRINCIPLES 31

instruction, considering the age of the pupils, but such
instruction is the means, not the end ; the real purpose
is the harmonious unfolding of the child's whole nature
with a view to free self-development and action.

Freedom and action are more valued by Frobel than
by educators generally. He has none of that fear of
vigorous character and sturdy will, which created the
old systems of home and school discipline, and the con-
venient prejudice that feebleness is womanly ; but the
freedom that he strives to place his pupils in possession
of, he leads them to exercise within the moral bounds
of conscience, love, and reverence, within the intellec-
tual bounds laid down by reason and the sense of
harmony and beauty which every Kinder-garten game
tends to associate with active enjoyment. Frobel exacts
obedience as rigidly as any other rational educator ; but
he leads the child first to feel, and then to know, that
obedience to higher wisdom is part of the order of
nature in which he lives. Freedom and law are not
in opposition for the child any more than for the man,
since settled law is the foundation of permanent freedom.

Action in conduct and in work is the practical ex-
pression at once of the character and of the intellect,
which find little room to show themselves in ordinary
systems of instruction ; thus all Kinder-garten teaching
ends in work — the pupil must reproduce what he has
learnt, he must express his own thoughts or fancies
through the medium of the various exercises I have
enumerated ; and the habit of independent work daily
strengthens will and steadfastness of purpose, without
which a child may at times be easier to manage, but the
absence of which makes the man or woman useless for

32 FROBEL'S PRINCIPLES [SEC. rv.

the duties of life. In proportion as conduct covers a
far larger portion of human life than abstract thought
or knowledge, so does Frobel value the child's work —
honest, accurate work — beyond his progress in infor-
mation. Work, which is the bread-winning necessity
for the mass of every nation, he considers to be also the
right engine of mental and physical development for all
mankind. Men who cannot reproduce the image that
has struck them, or embody the thought that possesses
them, are, according to Frobel's view, maimed of their
just proportions. He would have the hand no less
dextrous, the eye no less accurate, than the judgment is
sure ; hence his extreme value for drawing and modell-
ing. The test with him of a child's thorough appre-
hension is that the fact or image apprehended shall be
reproduced in /07m, if such as to be capable of being so
represented, or at least in accurate language. It is the
teacher's business to present no ideas or objects to the
child's mind that are beyond his power of clear appre-
hension. The highest thought to which he can be led,
that of God's love and goodness, comes to him in the
clear intelligible form of fatherly care and wisdom.

Most educational reformers, since Pestalozzi, had
recognised the value of manual labour as part of the
training of youth, but they failed by keeping the work
and the instruction too much apart; while Frobel so
orders the work that it becomes itself the instrument
of instruction, as we have seen in the construction of
figures with the cubes and bricks. The child must
produce, must express his own fancy with the materials
before him ; but while he does so he is learning the first
principles of symmetrical order and of geometry. He

SEC. rv.] FROBEL'S PRINCIPLES 33

is exercising his senses, acquiring steadiness of hand
and accuracy of eye, but he is also gaming the elements
of positive knowledge.

If now, after this review of Frobel's principles, we go
back to the games and exercises before described, we
shall see that they tend to forward each of the objects
he deemed important, and to harmonise them all. In
each part we may see that the natural impulse or
capacity has first been studied, and the practical method
so ordered as to unfold and direct it to the higher aims
of life.

The earliest mental manifestations in the infant are
the notice he takes of surrounding objects, and the desire
for activity, shown first in mere movements of the
limbs, and next in play ; hence Frobel uses play as the
means of directing the activity in the right channel, and
by means of games, such as those of the balls and cubes,
and afterwards by various exercises, employs the active
propensity and prepares it for real work.

The next faculty that Frobel takes advantage of, is
the instinct of curiosity, so strong in children, that
before they can speak they may be seen trying every
limb and sense in the effort to make nearer acquaintance
with some new object ; accordingly in the Kinder-garten
new objects are successively presented in such a manner
that the natural instinct is gradually developed into a
habit of inquiry, the first foundation of love of know-
ledge. And each new thing learnt, having been ac-
quired, not by an effort of memory, but by the exercise
of the child's own observation and understanding, is a
real step in advance. It may be infinitesimally small,
but it remains an acquisition for ever, and a sure founda-

c

34 FKOBEL'S PRINCIPLES [SEC. iv.

tion for the next step. Side by side with curiosity
the faculty of observation is developed. Roused at
first by the perception of light, and colour, and motion,
it is gradually led in Frb'bel's games to dwell on form
and other properties of the objects presented, as, for
instance, with the cubes and cylinders, and afterwards
through the various exercises which bring new forms
to view or new properties, such as magnitude and
numbers.

The senses are naturally cultivated in children by all
that attracts their observation — the eye, the ear, the
touch, are learning many a lesson before the child can run
or speak, and there is evident pleasure in the exercise.
Frobel takes advantage of this sense of enjoyment, and
trains the senses to accuracy and delicacy through a series
of games in which the children delight, by the various
kinds of work in which they exercise their own inge-
nuity, and especially by drawing, which he held in such
high value in almost every department of active training.
If we watch little children when they first begin to run
about and play together, we see that- they naturally
follow the lead, and have a sense of fitness and order in
doing so with a certain regularity. Marked recurring
intervals, for instance, for particular words or movements,
excite pleasure. Frobel seizes upon this natural sense,
and makes it serve the important purpose of preserving
strict order in the games he established. Children recog-
nise the law, learn to feel the help it gives in play, and
are more ready to own it in whatever thing they have to
do. Children love and seek companionship : the instinct
of sympathy is strong, though so often crossed by the
selfish instinct. Frobel orders every game and lesson

SEC. iv.] FROBEL'S PRINCIPLES 35

so that they impart the sense of a something in common
among the children — something that would be marred
if disunion, or ill-humour, or rudeness, forced the little
companions apart.

Finally, the sense of beauty, as much a part of the
child's nature as the active instinct, shown at first in
delight at bright colours or the flame of a candle, is
gently fostered and directed from beauty of colour to
that of form and symmetry, as by the construction of
regular figures with bricks, and the different kinds of
artistic work ; to harmony of sound and rhythm of move-
ment, by means of the songs and dances ; to the love-
liness of nature and the wonder of her operations which
garden work keeps ever present to eye and mind,
and thence by easy transition to the beauty of moral
action, such as comes within childish apprehension, —
unselfishness, courage, help given to the feeble and the
sick ; till, little by little, reverence for more perfect
goodness and power, which are felt to surround and
shelter the child's life, becomes the foundation of religious
love and trust.

Thus, through the whole field of infant education,
every natural tendency is watched ; and as it unfolds in
the genial atmosphere of love and care, it is so directed
that habit and association shall cement each step of pro-
gress made, and prepare the path for the future.

'The object of education,' says one of Frobel's ablest
commentators, ' is to bring man into the most complete
harmony with God and Nature ;'* and the system of the

* Hanschmann, Friedrich Frobel, die Entwickelung seine Erzie-
hungsidee in seinem Leben, p. 169.

36 FROBEL'S SYSTEM FOR [SEC. v.

Kinder-garten was framed to facilitate the first steps in
that great life-long endeavour.

SECTION V.

»

Frobels System in relation to ordinary Schools*

ONE of the objections that must be met in recommend-
ing the Kinder-garten for young children is the difficulty
of carrying the pupils from this to ordinary school
instruction. It is the only real difficulty that occurs in
the wide application of Frobel's system, and even this
is easily overcome by those who have grasped the real
spirit of the method -\ for the latter, being founded on
the actual facts ofimman nature, must evidently be no
less true in principle, though not in external form, for
one age as for another. Thus, although games with
balls and cubes and sticks are adapted only to infant
intelligence, yet the habit of observing resemblances
and differences, of testing facts by experience, is no less
valuable when pursuing the most abstruse study. The
Kinder-garten has dealt with the concrete only, it has
given object-lessons in the truest sense of the word ;
but it has taught the correct name for every fact,
and the habit of accurate language is the foundation of

* Th« subject of this section has been dealt with separately in a
pamphlet by Miss Shirreff, called "The Kinder-garten in relation to
Schools," published two years ago. Lately, another pamphlet by the
same writer, has, by mistake, been published with nearly the same
title, but its scope is different. Its object is to explain and elucidate
Mde. de Portugall's synoptical table of F rebel's System, one of the
most valuable contributors to Kinder-garten literature, showing the
connection of every portion of the early training with the fullest
development later education can reach.

SEC. V.] ORDINARY SCHOOLS 37

scientific teaching and of accurate thought. (Frobel
begins at the very lowest germ of intelligence ; but as
he always teaches a truth, or leads the child to observe
truly, he is always laying the sure ground for fuller
instruction in the future. The child has much to learn
as he goes from the Kinder-garten to school, but he has
absolutely nothing to unlearn ; and that fact covers so
large a ground on which time and faculties are gene-
rally wasted, that it alone would be sufficient to make the
Kinder-garten pupil acceptable to his schoolmaster, even
did he bring no other recommendation.

The great difficulty is to pass from the concrete to the
abstract — from object-lessons to working by rules and
formulae, of grammar and arithmetic. But it must be
remembered that the step thus taken is in the direction
of natural development ; and we carry with us the daily
unfolding power of the intelligence carefully trained
to habits that make the transition comparatively easy.
Also it must be borne in mind that as regards arithmetic,
the Kinder-garten pupil has already made unusual pro-
gress. In the work he has been trained to do, every
artistic lesson has had a geometrical or arithmetical
object likewise ; he has accurately learned many facts
concerning numbers, and their relation to one another;
he can perform correctly and understand clearly the
meaning of the four first operations of arithmetic.
Working by rules will therefore simply be a different
method of going over the old ground. But he has per-
formed these operations with fractions as well as with
units, and thus is familiar with what in the ordinary
method he would not approach till much later. So
likewise with geometry, of which the foundation has

38 FROBEL'S SYSTEM FOR [SEC. v.

been so accurately laid in the games and exercises, and
the correct terms been rendered so familiar, that the
child is ripe for learning what generally is reserved for
a much later period. Here, as at other stages of men-
tal growth, clear perception leads to true conception ;
and the child who has daily practised certain operations
in the concrete, will quickly apprehend the rules and
formulae as the convenient expressions by which pre-
viously acquired knowledge is summed up and made
fit to reason upon in the acquisition of further knowledge.
Kinder-garten training does not prepare so directly for
grammar as for mathematics, but it possesses no small
advantages even here. Children accustomed always to
use the correct term for what they are dealing with, to
feel so strongly the necessity of understanding what
they do, or what is before them, that they must ask the
meaning of the terms they use and the operations they
perform, will easily be led to seek for themselves why
words should be used in one order rather than another,
which word in a given sentence denotes a thing, which
other an action, and which again marks the time, or the
place, or the quality of the thing they are speaking of.
Thus they will learn to distinguish the parts of speech
from a sort of necessity of their own minds ; and the
analysis of sentences will precede the rules of grammar.
With geography and history the same advantage will be
felt ; the early topographical observations he has been
led to make around him — the form of the garden or the
pond ; the stream always running one way ; the wider
view obtained by climbing up the hill ; the sun some-
times shining on one side of the house, sometimes on the
other ; the moon occasionally lighting him up to bed,

SEC. V.] ORDINARY SCHOOLS 39

while at other times bright stars shine alone in the
darkened heavens ; — all these things, which the child has
observed, has thought and asked about again and again,
and learned to speak of in accurate language, afford so
many links by which the physical geography of wider
regions becomes easily knit to his experience and in-
terest. The little stories that he has listened to have
never been without a purpose. Where they have not
related to facts of natural history, they have touched
upon conduct, upon the lives of good men — later on of
great men, whose goodness or power had a wider field.
The stories are necessarily interrupted, because the
child's ignorance prevents his understanding more,
and each such interruption in a child so trained leads
to a desire to shake off the ignorance, and to take interest
in that wide region he begins dimly to see beyond.

Thus the transition from Kinder-garten exercises to
school instruction is not a difficult one, as I said before,
in the hands of those who thoroughly understand the
system ; though, if children were taken from the
Kinder-garten and suddenly thrown into the midst of
ordinary school teaching, doubtless there would ensue a
period of arrest and confusion. 'Education according
to nature is impossible without harmony between the
treatment of the earliest years with that of later periods,
for Nature knows no chasms; she ever prepares the
later development through that which went before.'*
It is, therefore, essential that the ' transition classes '
(vermittelung'sKlasse), as Frobel calls them, should be a
recognised senior department of the Kinder-garten ;

* Mde. von Marenholtz Bulow, p. 107.

FEOBEL'S SYSTEM FOR

[SEC. v.

that children, in short, instead of leaving the latter at
seven or eight years old, should pass into that department
for a year at least, and not go to school till they
have grown accustomed to learn from books as well as
from objects. In these classes they would learn to
read and to write, both operations being immensely
facilitated by the habit of remarking resemblances and
differences of form, and of constructing lines and figures
of various kinds. The little hand has already, through
the Kiuder-garten exercises, acquired steadiness enough
to guide the pen, and the eye so much accuracy
that not only letters, but words will be easily recognised.
In these classes, also, the early lessons of drawing will
be continued, and attention still be fixed upon natural
objects and the facts that belong to them, which here-
after will form the groundwork of instruction in physics
or natural history. Not only in this manner does
Frobel consider that a child is prepared to make good
use of learning, but that he will come to school studies
with so much mental preparation that it shall be pos-
sible to shorten the hours usually devoted to certain
necessary subjects, so far as to leave time for drawing,
for the more advanced study of physics and natural
history, and for the development of manual dexterity
and aesthetic feeling, whether in plastic art or in mere
handicraft. Frobel would consider the early education
to have been thwarted and made useless, if the youth
were not trained to the exercise of his bodily senses and
faculties, as fully as the child was so trained in the
Kinder-garten. If book-learning stilled in him the
active creative power which was to Frobel, as com-
pletely as the reasoning faculty, the stamp of true

SEC. V.] ORDINARY SCHOOLS 41

humanity, education would in his view be a failure.
' The present generation,' he said, ' sickens through
knowledge, and can only he made sound through action/
Thus stated, the opinion might at once be objected to as
applying to Germany only, not to England, where action
is always valued, even too much above knowledge; yet
it is in one sense true for us also. Direct education
with us also is intellectual only; morally it is due to
indirect influences, and as regards action it is left to the
play-ground. The physical development in Frobel's
method, the training of hand and eye, of all the limbs
and all the senses, is systematically ordered towards a
definite purpose ; while the active exercise is intellectual
as well as physical. Both are truly educational ; and
the practical judgment, which is their result, will be
based on true principles.

Hence the feeling which all Frobel's disciples share,
that much reading is not advisable for the young. They
hold, even more than other educators, that development
of the mental faculties, not the acquisition of knowledge,
is the purpose of education. 'With us/ says Mde..
Yon Marenholtz Bulow, 'childhood sickens, under the
early over-pressure of the understanding, and the want
of opportunity for bodily and creative activity, which
cultivates the will and power of action. . . . Learning
too early and too much, that is, too much for the power
of working out the knowledge, the preponderance of
receptivity, with almost entire absence of production,
with no opportunity for practical realisation — this leaves
no room for the fresh, full, natural life which is proper
to childhood and youth/* It is accordingly an object
* "Hie Arbeit und die neue Erziehung, p. 40.

FROBEL'S SYSTEM FOR

[SEC. v.

of the Frobel method to hinder the ripening of the
reasoning and critical faculty without corresponding
practical activity. 'Independent action must be the
preparation for independent thought/

For all these reasons it is well that children should
begin ordinary school studies upon the Kinder-garten
principle ; and, lastly, it is well that this should be so, '
because teachers imbued with Frobel's doctrines alone
feel the deep power of that simultaneous cultivation of
the child's whole nature, of which the foundation is laid
in the Kinder-garten. They alone have studied how to
bind the aesthetic and moral training with the intellectual
development, and feel that only so combined does either
produce its full fruits. Until this shall become the ac-
knowledged aim of all education, it is well at least to
keep the child while we can under these vivifying
influences, to lead him on so far, at least, in the right
direction, that he shall be sensible of some unnatural
discord when the too common tone of schools and of
ordinary life reveals to him that knowledge and good-
ness are not always found together, and that even good
and clever men can deform human life by the absence
of all that sense of beauty which has been to him, since
lie could first see and feel, an essential element of
happiness. The shock may be rude to the poor child
who awakes thus in another world, as it were, from that
in which his own faculties opened to life ; but the very
change may enhance the beauty of the former experience ;
and, as far away from home the unforgotten accents of
our native tongue ring as music in our ears, so the
children, turned out from their garden of Paradise into
the wilderness of common life, may perchance bear all

SEC. V.] ORDINARY SCHOOLS 43

the more closely in their hearts the memory of that
holy triad of beauty, goodness, and truth, whose ex-
quisite harmony was ever present in the teaching that
guided their earliest steps ; and whose influence may
strengthen and refresh them through many a later hour
of trying contact with that lower state of things which
•tye venture to call civilisation.

SECTION VI.

FrobeVs System in Relation to Industrial Training
and the Life of the People

IF I have succeeded in convincing the reader that the
difficulty of introducing Kinder-garten pupils to ordi-
nary school life, of bridging over the chasm between
instruction through objects, and instruction through
books, is one easily surmounted, and that the child who
has enjoyed that early training will come so well pre-
pared to make the best kind of progress in actual study,
that it little matters though the latter be somewhat
deferred — it will be evident that, as regards the cul-
tivated classes of a nation, the groundwork laid in the
Kinder-garten is altogether advantageous. "We have
now to consider what it does for those whose position
excludes them from later culture, and who must early
in life be trained to industrial arts, or even be content
with receiving no mental training at all after the years
spent in elementary schools.

44 FROBEL'S SYSTEM ix DELATION TO [SEC. vi.

This is in one sense the most important side of the
question, because affecting the widest phase of cational
life. Frobel's system would still be invaluable, even if
it were fitted only for those who will have the means
of later culture; but it could lay no claim to being a
system of true human education, because it would lack
the element of universality, which must be the charac-
teristic of the latter. This, however, is just what Fro-
bel's system does possess; it belongs to no class or
nation, but to all. Wherever children are to be found
endowed with ordinary human faculties, those faculties,
moral, intellectual, and physical, are capable of being
directed so as to ensure their harmonious development.
No normally constituted human creature is incapable
of being led to observe nature, to apprehend facts cor-
rectly, to exercise bodily activity and manual dexterity,
to admire beauty, to love goodness, to revere God.
Such direction, then, which is the aim of Frobel's sys-
tem, is a universal foundation of education ; and it is
further evident that the less chance an}T young creature
has to share the treasure of culture hereafter, the more
needful is it that this, which can be made a universal
heritage, should be secured to him early.

Again, if the Kinder-garten training can, as I showed
in the last paper, facilitate the after- w7ork of school,
leaving time for other instruction, none can require it
so much as those children to whom a few years of
elementary teaching will be the whole of intellectual
education, who must begin practical life at an age when
other children are under tuition, and will ever after
have scanty leisure to add to their small stock of know-
ledge. Every new facility for culture that can be given

SEC. VI.] INDUSTRIAL TRAINING, ETC. 45

to this class is immensely more valuable than to the
more fortunate minority, who can extend their educa-
tion over ten more years of life, and can always com-
mand the best sources of knowledge, and the tuition
that will make those sources available. In elementary
education, therefore, Frobel's system answers to a want
that is daily more felt, as we strive too often in vain to
cram the barest elements of knowledge into the few
years the poor man can give to his child's mental
improvement. The London School Board has •recog-
nised the value of Frobel's method of early training,
by appointing Miss Lyschinska to introduce a know-
ledge of the Kinder-garten system among the infant
school teachers ; and earlier still, the authorities of the
Stockwell Training College showed the same apprecia-
tion by their appointment of Miss Heerwart as direc-
tress of a complete Kinder-garten branch of their college
work. The danger attending these measures, however
valuable they are as first steps, and as indications of
a growing sense of the value of Frobel's principles, is,
lest the system should be judged by what must be
the very slight results to be so obtained. In nothing,
perhaps, is a little proficiency so dangerous as in this,
because it is so easy to make the practice seem perfect,
while the principles to which the practice owes all its
value are ignored. As I have before remarked (p. 7),
if the children's games are mere games to the teacher
also, the whole thing is educationally useless.

The children of the poor will not probably in a given
time profit as much by the Kinder-garten exercises as
the children of more favoured classes, whose home
habits have made good language familiar, have intro-

46 FROBEL'S SYSTEM IN RELATION TO [SEC. vi.

duced them to a larger vocabulary, and given them
the use of many things which may have refined the
sense of touch, and enlarged their perceptions ; for as
every hour of life is training the mere infant in one
way or another, all its surroundings are, with or with-
out purpose or method, influencing the future educa-
tion ; but this is only another reason why Kinder-garten
training is doubly essential to the poor child who de-
pends for his entire mental culture on what he gets out
of home.

The passage from object-lessons to ordinary school
lessons may in like manner be perhaps more laborious
to the poor man's child than to the better nurtured, for
there is less nimbleness of intellect, if we may so ex-
press it, when the traditions of culture are wanting;
but when this difficulty is overcome, the advantage pos-
sessed by the Kinder-garten pupil over a child taught
in the ordinary infant school becomes apparent. The
two children may be about equal in reading, writing,
and arithmetic ; but the one gets through his tasks
laboriously, and can do nothing else, while we find the
other, whose eyes, hands, and powers of observation
have been carefully exercised through various channels,
doing them easily and intelligently.

He will then make progress so much more rapidly
that in the same period spent at school there will be
ample time to give him instruction of a wider kind or
higher order, which may lay the foundation of really
intelligent tastes for after years, while his companion is
still struggling with the difficulties which perhaps at
last prevent his passing the requisite standard before
the overwhelming necessities of life call him to exclu-

SEC. VI.] INDUSTRIAL TRAINING, ETC. 47

give manual toil. Even if the required point has been
reached, the boy is in a state of intellectual destitution,
that gives small hopes of his making any future use of
his school acquirements. He has learned to read, but
he has had no pleasure from knowledge. He has
learned to write, but his hand is too stiff and clumsy to
make the exercise anything but a laborious effort. He
has learned to work rules of arithmetic, but he knows
nothing of the relations of numbers, that give an inte-
rest to the dry cyphering. The possibility, as regards
time, of including drawing in the elementary school
course was a few months ago a matter of discussion at
the London School Board, the difficulty already felt of
meeting the legal requirements being strongly urged
against such an addition. But Kinder-garten pupils
would come to school with eyes and fingers already
trained for drawing, and, as I said above, with so much
facility for the usual lessons, that time may be spared
for their other studies, bodily exercises, and manual
arts, begun in the Kinder-garten, thus completing the
scanty teaching of the elementary school. Under such
a system the labourer's child would acquire, in addition
to the usual school learning, such a foundation of draw-
ing, geometry, and natural history, so much habit of
observing nature, and of inquiring into what he observes,
that his working life would begin from an altogether
higher level of intelligence. What his hand has to do
he will do with care and precision ; what is before his
eyes he will observe with accuracy and discrimination ;
and what amusements he seeks we ma}7 fairly hope will
be beyond the pale of the public-house.

1 have seemed here to speak of boys only, but of

43 FROBEL'S SYSTEM IN RELATION TO [SEC. vi.

course the advantage is the same to children of both
sexes. The girls so trained will in like manner carry
the benefit of that more complete development of
natural faculty into the work of after years, and as
mothers they will take a very different view of their
office from that which the women of the lower classes
generally take. Remembering how early their own
education began, and round what little things it seemed
to turn, they also will begin early, and observe little
things, and recall the Kiuder-garten songs as they
watch the infant's cradle, and try to prepare it for the
course of instruction which was so happy and so fruitful
to themselves. The love of order and. of beauty, which
are such characteristic results of Kinder-garten educa-
tion, will nowhere produce more important fruits than
in the women, on whose care, and neatness, and regu-
larity is due everything that raises the labouring man's
home above the sleeping and feeding-place of the human
animal.

And now, if we suppose that the boy or girl on leav-
ing school goes to learn a trade or any industrial art, it
seems almost superfluous to dwell upon the advantage
of beginning the apprenticeship with such command of
the bodily and mental instruments of labour as Kinder-
garten instruction confers, with senses trained to ac-
curacy, hands used to delicate operations, and the limbs
to orderly and supple movements. It is evident that
one so prepared would altogether distance another who
has this necessary foundation of all careful workman-
ship to acquire. And as difficulties are lessened, the
time required for learning a trade is diminished, wages
may be earned at an earlier period, or leisure secured

SEC. VI.] INDUSTRIAL TRAINING, ETC. 49

for further instruction. Suppose, for instance, the boy
entering a carpenter's shop for the first time, and
bringing with him a habit of observing, measuring, and
drawing lines and angles, and of working with his
hands quickly and correctly, is it not evident how soon
the use of tools will become easy to him ? Suppose
him or his sister entering a china factory with eyes
used to distinguish form and colour, having learned
something of drawing, perhaps of modelling, and being
trained at any rate to be true and accurate in all their
work, what progress will they make, as compared with
others, to whom all this is unknown ? Again, suppose
they are employed in connection with machinery, what
will not be the value of their early acquired habits of
order, regularity, and precision ? Or let us follow the
young girl to a purely feminine trade — to dressmaking,
for example — and see how quickly her habits of delicate
handiwork and correct observation will come into play :
how easily she will copy, how soon she will be fit to cut
out, thanks to the childish exercises in accurate measure-
ment, and use of the scissors in cutting out paper
designs; or let us see her begin domestic service in
common housework, where she will use her eyes and
hands intelligently, and feel at once how economy, as
well as beauty, depends on order and nicety ; or in the
kitchen, where again the disciplined accuracy in work,
the hand skilled in various movements, and the in-
telligence trained to understand the meaning of each
manual operation to be performed, will come in to
lessen indefinitely the difficulties of the practical train-
ing, and perhaps in time to persuade the public that
what stands in the way of our having good servants is

50 FROBEL'S SYSTEM ix RELATION TO [SEC. YL

not popular education, but the want of education — that
withholding knowledge will not increase the dexterity
of the hand, nor give the qualities needed to direct it,
and which belong only to carefully trained habits of
observation and accuracy. It is easy to imagine that
many persons will say the advocates of this system ride
a hobby, and that the large results we anticipate will
be nullified, as the results of other plans of education
have again and again disappointed reformers. Bat the
answer to this is twofold ; first, no other system of
nursery training is based on a philosophical study of
human nature ; secondly, all school systems neglect two
or three years of child-life, which the Kinder-garten
turns to account, and thus not only begin later, but
begin when habits and inclinations are already in some
measure formed, and probably hostile to those the
educator wishes to train. It is not so much that other
methods fail, as that we are inconsistent in our ex-
pectations— we hope to reap what we have never sown.
Those ordinary school methods teach certain definite
things, and must be judged according as they succeed
in giving accurate knowledge of them, but they do not
attempt to draw out all the faculties, or to take hold of
the emotional and imaginative side of the child's nature ;
in short, the most complete instruction is not education,
and the failures of the former cannot affect our estimate
of the latter, which on any large scale has never even
been tried. Now, Frobel's system is education in the
truest sense ; to try it, therefore, is a new experiment
in every way. It gives its most strenuous efforts to
achieve those very things which ordinary methods
neglect ; it cares comparatively little for teaching, but

SEC. VI.] INDUSTRIAL TRAINING, ETC. 51

it strives to fashion the human creature so that it shall
derive full benefit from all later teaching, whether of
books or the experience of life ; and, I repeat, that its
value increases in proportion as that later teaching will
be circumscribed. To the great mass of mankind, whose
lives must be devoted to bread- winning labour, the
period of mental training comes not again after child-
hood is closed — in truth, it comes not again to any of
us, though we may strive by later culture to remedy the
short-comings of early education. To the poor man
those short-comings are final, and fatally do they help
to hedge in his whole after-life within the circle of
bodily necessities. Henceforth one influence only —
that of the short Church services of one day in seven —
makes any attempt to lift him above that circle, and
this too often in so narrow a way that they appeal as
little to his understanding, as the school-teaching ap-
pealed to his moral and imaginative faculties. Frobel
alone has worked out a system of education which,
beginning from the very dawn of intelligence, makes
the right use of the various faculties a second nature —
works on the whole being, till the heart and intelligence
expand together, and the disinherited of the earth
are called to share in the spiritual inheritance of our
common humanity, in those joys which make mental
activity so far nobler a thing than a mere instrument
of profit, and enable all to realise the words of Christ,
that ' man shall not live by bread alone/ lifting him
whatever his earthly station, to join his brethren in love
for all that is great and beautiful in God's world, and
for Him as the Author of all.

52 FROBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN [SEC, vn.

SECTION VII.
Frobel's Appeal to Women

FROBEL did not at once direct his attention to infant
training. The Kinder-garten was the crowning work
of a life devoted to the study of education, and to prac-
tical teaching. I may say in one sense that he went
back step by step till he stood beside the infant's cradle.
He was still a student at the University of Jena, when
the state of society around him, the low condition —
mental and physical — into which he felt that his country
had fallen, forced upon him the conviction that only
by the education of another generation on better prin-
ciples with a freer and wider scope, morally and intel-
lectually, and with more attention to the laws of
physical development, could the nation be awakened
to a higher and better life. This conviction was shared
more. or less by all the best men of Germany at that
time ; and the half century that has elapsed since then
has shown, by the immense progress made in those
portions of culture that have been really cared for, what
is the power of education when steadily wielded towards
a given purpose.

.But Frobel did not desire the cultivation of any
portion at the expense of the rest — the hothouse training
of intelligence was not education to him; and thus
all the efforts made, and the improvement achieved,
were still, in his view, stamped with imperfection. He
did not complain of mere shortcomings in the results,
such as we find in all human undertakings, but of
radical imperfection of system ; and he had no peace

SEC. vii.] FKOBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN 53

till, little by little, through the course of long laborious
years, he had elaborated a new system, more in accord-
ance with nature, and with man's mission upon earth.

Poverty having cut his own studies short, he accepted
subordinate work in a school as a means of living. Thus
apparent accident made a teacher of the man who, by
the watch-fires of Germany's army of deliverance, as
well as in his student's room at Jena, had dreamed of
education as the salvation of his country. In his new
vocation all his previous opinions were strengthened,
and he longed for the opportunity of independent action,
He took private pupils ; he went with them to work
under Pestalozzi, whose theories he had closely studied,
and strengthened and enlarged his own principles by
the study of the merits and defects of that great man's
system. It is impossible here to follow his course in
detail ; as soon as he was able he established' a school
himself, hoping to work out his own theories ; but the
untrained condition of the boys who came to him, made
his hopes nugatory. His pupils had little time left them
beyond what was imperatively required to prepare
them for the University ; it was too late for that gene-
ral training which, in his view, was so absolutely essen-
tial. Next, he hoped that better methods of teaching
might attain his purpose, and he founded a school for
teachers ; and, aided by other eminent men, who
enthusiastically followed his lead, he trained teachers,
who afterwards did good service in the cause. But his
own immediate difficulty remained the same. While
all who came to be taught had so much to unlearn,
time could never suffice for the necessary routine of
acquisition, and the real work of education-.

54 FKOBEL'a APPEAL TO WOMEN [SEC. VII.

At last, his mind ever working upon this question,
he reached the true solution. The right direction of
the faculties must be given at the earliest dawn of life ;
the development, to be systematic and harmonious, must
begin before neglect or over-stimulus had stinted some
faculties, or given undue preponderance to others — be-
fore chance associations or habits had warped the course
of infant growth. In a word, the child must be studied
and trained from the cradle, if we would hope that
school training should have due effect. Then would
there be ample time for education in its fullest sense ;
and the making of the scholar would no longer interfere
with the development of the human being. When once
Frobel had grasped this idea, the next step was clear.
He turned from schoolmasters and professors to women.
He called upon mothers to be no longer satisfied with
the lower cares of motherhood, but to recognise the
higher office laid upon them by Heaven — to remember
that they were the spiritual mothers of the race, the
educators for good, or for evil, of each new generation.

The effect was thrilling. Young mothers came for
counsel and direction, childless widows and unmarried
women devoted themselves unselfishly to the cause
which he preached, as that of the nation, that of hu-
manity. He worked out gradually his system of infant
training, and established the first Kinder-garten in a
retired village, and taught in it himself, becoming the
very idol of the children. Many women came to work
there under his direction ; they were of all ranks and ages,
the young girl, and the woman rich in the experience
of life, or worn by its toils and cares. All alike bowed
before his lofty teaching, and felt the spell of his earnest

SEC. vii.] FROBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN 55

simplicity. From this centre, knowledge of the new
system spread with varied success. I cannot here follow
its chequered history, nor trace the causes that have
hindered till now its full development. One name only
now must be mentioned,that of Baroness von Marenholtz
Billow, whose work has been so often referred to in these
pages. She was among Frobel's earliest disciples, and
since his death has for years devoted her great talents
to the advocacy of his views, preaching them from land
to land, till she awakened the interest of lovers of
education in France, England, Italy, and America, as
well as in Germany.

England, as might have been expected from the na-
tional distrust of foreign ways and of new theories, has
been the most backward in adopting the system ; though
even among us some admirable Kinder-gartens have for
years been established. The time is now come, however,
when a new impulse may, I hope, be given to the
movement ;* and simultaneously with this must be echoed
Frobel's appeal to women, on the response to which its
real success must depend ; for it is not enough to esta-
blish the system in schools : it must be received in our
homes and nurseries, if it is to produce a wide harvest
of good. Now, then, when women are asking for edu-
cation and eager for work, the moment seems favourable
for placing before them an object which will require the
best culture they can obtain, and give the noblest direc-
tion to their powers.

* The above was written soon after the foundation of the Frobel
Society. Now, after five years' work, we again hope that a new impulse
will be given by the London Training College for Kinder-garten teachers
founded by the Society.

56 FROBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN [SEC. vn.

Of course it will be said in answer that all women do
not care for children, that all will not become mothers,
that wider paths are now open, requiring different stu-
dies ; and all this may be granted, and the advantage
of a variety of interests and pursuits fully recognised,
and yet the fact remains that for the majority of women
— if, indeed, I may not say for all — the care of children
enters more or less into their lives. W Even those who
never become mothers are continually, for one reason
or another, forced to assume the care of a family, though
they may not win either the joy or the reward. This
general fact depends not on social arrangement or con-
ventional laws, but on the constitution of nature ; and
thus we may be certain that whatever outward paths
may finally be cleared for women, who from choice or
necessity turn from home to the world, those who follow
them exclusively will, as compared with the whole, still
be the exceptions only; while home duties and responsi-
bilities will absorb the energies of the sex in general, as
they have done hitherto. The real question at issue is,
whether, as hitherto, they shall continue to be assumed
in ignorance of their true scope and importance.

When we come to inquire what studies may be called
essential to women, we find that foremost among them
stands that of education, considered practically and
philosophically ; and since no method of early educa-
tion is comparable with that of Frobel for the breadth
of its principles and the comprehensiveness of its aims,
we should desire to see every young woman, without
exception of rank or immediate destination, go through
a course of Kinder-gar ten training, including, in the
educated classes, the study of the principles and the

SEC. VII.] FPtOBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN 57

philosophy of the method. Even young girls who are
destined for some professional or industrial calling will
be aided rather than hindered by the additional
previous culture thus obtained. A woman seriously
trained for her vocation of education will enter upon
any other calling with a clear and cultivated under-
standing, with carefully trained habits of observation
and reasoning, with sound knowledge of the first
principles of physical science, with attention turned to
the study of character which gives facility for living
and working among others, and, above all, with the
sense that life must be regulated by duty ; and, thus
provided, we need not fear that she should find herself
at a disadvantage among her competitors.

No one has advocated more earnestly than myself
the absolute mental freedom of women, their inde-
feasible right, as human beings, to devote their faculties
to any subject which most attracts them, to spend their
energy in any direction that promises most enjoyment
or advantage, within the bounds that every moral being
must respect ; but Nature lays some special duties upon
each sex, and duties take precedence of privileges.
Many a service of peril lays a heavy claim upon men,
from which women are exempt ; and in the same way
the care of the young lays a paramount claim upon the
latter, which Nature binds every woman to acknowledge
and prepare herself to discharge fully and faithfully.
The man who in the hour of danger should declare
himself unfit to aid in the defence of his country would
not be more deaf to patriotism and religion, than the
woman to whom the intelligent care of children
remained strange or unknown.

FROBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN [SEC. vn.

Tliis universal training of women in the principles
of true infant education is most earnestly advocated by
Madame von Marenholtz Billow. She gives the various
periods she considers necessary for the various degrees
of instruction different classes might be able to acquire,
or which would be needed for different positions of
responsibility. She considers that for those who intend
to take up the employment professionally, a year is the
shortest time that should be given to the study of the
system, practically and theoretically, while an addi-
tional year of probation as an assistant is further
requisite to fit any one to become directress of a
Kinder-garten. The shorter period of study that has
often been thought sufficient, and the consequent
superficial knowledge of principles in many teachers,
has been, in her opinion, the cause of the slow progress
the method has made. Educated women wishing to
prepare themselves generally for possible future duties
require the same extent of theoretical study, but not the
same time to be spent in practical exercise. Next, for
women who intend to become nursery governesses
(bonnes d'enfants), working under a mother's direction,
a shorter period of preparation may suffice ; the philo-
sophical study may be abridged, while they are well
grounded in first principles, and in the practical part of
the system. And, lastly, nursery-maids would only be
required to be acquainted with the latter, possessing
only those first elements of knowledge without which
even the earliest games could not be taught to little
children, bringing with them that tender reverence for
childhood which is inspired by Frobel's method, and
which will at least make them feel the danger of

SEC. VIL] FKOBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN 59

ignorance in their treatment either of mind or body.
When we consider the coarse material out of which we
make nursery-maids now, it needs no words to show
what advantages would accrue from this degree of
instruction given to all the women of the working
classes. We need not be told that such a thing is
impossible at present ; in unfolding the plan for a great
reform, we necessarily project ourselves into the future.
But that future, and not, I trust, a distant one, will see
these schools greatly multiplied, and gradually brought
within the reach of all. Even now, women who have
leisure to study, may acquaint themselves with the
theory and philosophy of the subject, and may with
little trouble watch its application in some of the
existing Kinder-gartens. Later, girls whether educated
at home or at school will be able to go through their
regular course of instruction without difficulty. If in
town, a Kinder-garten will be found attached to every
large school which now receives a class of young
children; if in the country, there would be the
Kinder-garten attached to the elementary schools;
which, whether in town or country, would likewise
afford the means of instruction for girls of the working
classes.

It will only require a little perseverance, perhaps
some reward or distinction, to induce mothers of those
classes -to send their daughters for a few hours a-week
to the Kinder-garten ; they would soon be encouraged
to do so by the benefits that would accrue to them-
selves, either in the superior help girls so trained
would give in the care of younger children, or of the
household generally, or in the better wages they would

60 FROBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN [SEC. vn.

receive if they go to service ; for we may suppose that
it would soon become a settled custom to take as
nursery-maids only girls so instructed. Lastly, when
— as I trust will happen — Frobel's method is adopted
universally as the foundation of education for all classes,
then women, having been trained themselves as children
in the Kinder-garten, will learn with far greater facility,
both the practice and the theory ; the former will be
outwardly familiar, the latter will be more easily
apprehended by minds whose own culture has been
systematically grounded. Thus, as time goes on, a
reform, the ultimate consequence of which we are
unable to calculate, will be more and more facilitated
and accelerated.

That the wide adoption of these schools will make a
very large demand for women's labour is evident, and
that the serious study they will require will raise the
popular estimation of women's ratural vocation, is
certain. Few things have so much contributed to
foster the generally contemptuous opinion of woman's
capacity, as the frivolous and ignorant view taken of
her share in the work of the race. To men seems to
fall naturally all important labour in the State, to
women only household care and the rearing of children.
But when the care of children shall be recognised in its
true light, it will be seen that no labour for the State
exceeds, if any equals in importance, that which women
have thus laid upon them.

It is not, then, as to an inferior part in the social
division of labours, nor necessarily to an exclusive task,
that we call women, in urging upon them all to make
education their first study. Far from it, we call them

SEC. vii.] FROBEL'S APPEAL TO WOMEN 61

to a task that underlies all others, but excludes none,
while it opens to women a region of influence and
powers so great and far-reaching that it has been
made the battle-field of statesmen and Jesuits for
generations. In the history of that long struggle
'between Church and State for the control of Educa-
tion, women may learn to measure the power that is
theirs, independent alike of Church or State decrees,
and which their own feebleness or ignorance can alone
curtail or pervert.

And the more they realise this fact, the greater will
be their gratitude to Frobel, who was the first to pro-
claim, upon national grounds, this supreme importance
of women's mission, and to call upon them, in the name
of God and humanity, to undertake that deepest and
most searching of social reforms which begins at the
infant's cradle, and on which must ultimately rest all
our hopes of a better future for the race.

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN.*

[THE term "higher education" is much in use at pre-
sent, and seems in different quarters to indicate such
different meanings, that I will at once state that in
using it myself I mean simply the education that fol-
lows that of school. Higher instruction would be, of
course, the right expression, if it were possible in Eng-
lish to preserve the proper distinction between those
terms, the confused use of which is at the root of so
much confusion in our views of the whole subject.
Higher instruction is the course of study pursued after
the preparatory studies of school time are completed;
higher education would in its full meaning comprise
these, as part of the means of that self-culture which
begins when childish trammels are cast off, to end only
when the uses of this world have trained the immortal
spirit for higher work in some yet unknown region.

The only use of dwelling on the distinction here, is
lest it should be imagined by some that the term
finished, which has been ridiculed, as applied to school
studies, could perhaps belong to higher education.

There is a great danger in seeking to reform so defec-
tive a method of instruction as that which has prevailed
for girls, lest the attempt should be made to enlarge
the curriculum too much, an attempt which would
inevitably lead us back to superficiality and want of
thoroughness. The one aim of school teaching should

* "What is between brackets is added to the original papers.
E

66 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

be to discipline the faculties for future use, and to do
so by means of such a thorough groundwork of instruc-
tion in subjects considered important, that the portals
of real knowledge may be open for wider search in any
direction in which the scholars may be impelled here-
after to turn. For instance, mathematics, history,
science, which figure grandly on the prospectus of
schools, are mere delusive names if any serious study
of these subjects is supposed to be made; but they
stand for something very real if the school course gives
concerning them such a perfect hold upon principles,
such familiar acquaintance with outline, that the pupil
knows accurately ivhere he stands, how to advance
farther, how large is the field beyond him, and what is
the direction he must take if he would explore any por-
tion of it.

The wide extension of classes for ladies within the
last few years, gives satisfactory evidence that we are
gradually growing out of that disastrous notion that the
close of school life is the close of study ; that there is no
purpose for women in knowledge, and, therefore, that
school-girl acquisitions suffice to furnish them forth for
life. The University local examinations have done great
service to women in enforcing the recognition of the
difference between school lessons, and higher culture.
The threefold series of Cambridge examinations point
to three stages : the elementary and the more advanced
school studies up to eighteen years of age, and the
higher examination open to men and women after
eighteen, to which corresponds the London University
examination for women, lately placed on exactly the
same footing as the matriculation examination for men,

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 67

Thus the principle has been proclaimed by the highest
educational authorities in the country that education
does not close at eighteen for women any more than
for men. We are a long way yet from the universal
acceptance of this fact, or of any practical course
founded upon it ; but the necessities of life forcing
many women to more serious study than heretofore,
their example is not without its influence ; and every-
day difficulties are lessened, and prejudices softened,
which formerly raised formidable barriers against the
efforts of educators. Hence the rapid spread of the
classes above mentioned ; concerning which the only
criticism I should be disposed to make is, that they
have, generally speaking, been somewhat desultory,
that they have not drawn the line I should wish to
draw between the essential, and what may be left to
individual taste. A guiding thread, a link of purpose
in our studies, which groups them round one centre,
gives them stability and coherence, and the tone of
the culture is higher than when it is composed of here
a little and there a little, gathered as fancy impels in
different directions. In building up our intellectual
structure, we have three distinct stages to go through :
first, the foundation to be laid, and the capacity for
work to be acquired, and this belongs to school dis-
cipline; secondly, to acquire what is essential for our
distinct duties in life ; thirdly, to exercise free choice
in gratifying to the utmost whatever love of know-
ledge we are fortunate enough to possess. When we
depart widely from this order, we introduce confusion
and lose all method in our culture. In former views of
girls' education, no such order was ever dreamed of, and

68 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

now, in our haste to shake off the old ignorance, we are
too apt to overlook method and purpose for the sake of
varied acquirements.

My object then in the following pages is to dwell upon
this distinction between the essentials, corresponding
to professional education ; and the non-essential that can
be left to individual choice and capacity, and whose
range may indeed be co-extensive with the whole field
of human knowledge. Let us then try to ascertain what
is really indispensable for the education of women.

Considered in this light, three subjects stand out
prominently — human physiology, mental and moral
philosophy, and political, or, as I may prefer to call it,
social economy. These are the three subjects without
some knowledge of which no woman is fully furnished
for the duties of life, and they are subjects which in my
opinion are distinctly beyond the school curriculum,
except in the barest elements. If it were my province
to speak of the education of men, I might prove that
the same knowledge given to them would tend to rectify
some terrible evils, under which the world has suffered
from generation to generation ; but what makes it
indispensable to women is, that the welfare of childhood
and the comfort of households must rest in their hands,
and will be cared for only in some haphazard fashion
without that knowledge of the conditions of physical
health, of mental health, and of the health of society,
which is acquired by means of the three studies above
named. It is evident that taking this kind of practical
view of any subject, it is elementary knowledge only
that is implied. I am asking no such obvious impossi-
bility as that all well-educated women should be thorough

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN C9

political economists, or philosophers, or physiologists; but
only that they should know enough to act safely within
the limits of educational work and of ordinary social
relations, in which the principles of those sciences are
the only safe guides, — enough, especially, to distrust
ignorance, and to know when their own knowledge fails.
If it be objected that all women will not be mothers
and mistresses of households, I reply — as I have often
replied before — that exceptions cannot be taken into
account in discussing general principles. Few women
— probably none— begin life deliberately intending not
to marry : I should be truly sorry for those who did so.
The determination would indicate a nature so poor in
its sympathies of heart and mind as not to feel the- joys
and responsibilities of that fuller existence that is bound
up in the strongest of human ties ; or it would point to
a youth so saddened by home misery as to have formed
the stern resolve never to accept a yoke which can
become so crushing to all that makes life dignified or
happy. But, thank God, both these cases are rare ;
utterly cold natures are singular exceptions, and early
experience of misery at home more often unfortunately
drives girls to accept the first offer of marriage that
takes them from the evils they do know, to brave in
ignorant self-confidence the untried evils of the future.
Few, then, are the women who determinately shut them-
selves out from the ordinary duties of their sex, and of
the large number who for various reasons of a different
kind remain single, how many do we find who, at one
time or other of their lives, are called upon to undertake
family cares and responsibilities, though excluded from
the rights and the joys that should accompany them, to

70 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

supplement the failing strength of others, to raise in one
way or another the burden that has fallen from feebler
or more careless hands. Certainly the cases are nu-
merous enough to warrant the assertion that with few
exceptions all women are more or less concerned in the
management of children and of household affairs, and
therefore that all subjects necessary to be learned to
make that management wise and thorough are indis-
pensable subjects for the higher education of girls.

First, then, as regards Physiology. It strikes a mind
that has any notion of the difference between certainty
and uncertainty, between knowledge and ignorance, as
something not only strange, but awful, that the health
of children should be trusted to women who are
absolutely ignorant of the mechanism of those delicate
frames, of the nature of the organs whose right action
is life, whose impeded, faltering action is worse than
death, since it may continue through years of that dire
form of human misery called delicate health, destroying
enjoyment, lessening usefulness, adding weight to every
burden, a darker shadow to every care. Yet so fearful
a calamity may result, and does result in numberless
instances, from the ignorance of mothers. This subject
was admirably treated in a little book written nearly
forty years ago, by Dr Andrew Combe ;* but in this
age of much writing and rapid reading wise words are
soon forgotten ; a generation has passed away since
Dr Combe wrote, and till very lately we have still been
asking whetheryoung women should be taught physiology.
In every illness the best physician will be the readiest

* Physiology applied to Health and Education.

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 71

to acknowledge the assistance given by skilful nursing,
and accordingly nursing is an important part of the
practical application of the knowledge we contend for,
and should be systematically taught to every woman ;
but if nursing is valuable in illness, the same intelligent
care is no less needful to prevent illness. Nursing deals
with one definite state of things, and careful attention
to a limited range of facts is sufficient to enable us to
assist the physician's treatment, or to clear away impedi-
ments to the restorative action of the great physician
Nature ; but in ordinary life the conditions are far more
complicated. "We believe things are going right because
the elements of evil are hidden. The nature and func-
tions of the great organs being unknown, the conditions
under which the functions are healthily carried out are
unknown also. If we do not know the proper normal
state, neither can we detect the abnormal. Much is said
and written in these days about hygiene, but unless it
is treated as a part of applied physiology, it is a mere
set of rules ; science debased to routine from want of
knowing the principle on which it rests. Just as school-
masters undertake to educate N^ithout any study of the
nature and action of the human mind, so mothers
undertake the care of health without knowing the
A B C of the conditions on which health depends ; for
such knowledge can be acquired by a study of physiology
alone. A few empirical laws about pure air and whole-
some food may be learned easily, but what it is in the
structure of the lungs and the heart that make certain
qualities of the air hurtful or the reverse, — what the
digestive organs require from the daily food in order to
nourish and repair, and to send a pure and vigorous

72 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

current of blood through the frame, — what care is
needed to keep the action of the brain clear and healthy,
to maintain that balance of physical and mental activity
on which harmonious development depends, these things
can be known only by special study. And it is this
sturdy which I have here placed first in my list of sub-
jects indispensable for the higher education of women;
not because it can claim priority over subjects that
relate to mental and moral health, but because it comes
first in point of time among the mother's cares and
responsibilities, and that it bears directly on the work
of life for all, whether mothers or not.

For obvious reasons, greater difficulties attend the
study of physiology for young women than perhaps
that of any other subject, and till comparatively lately
the desired knowledge could in most cases be obtained
from books alone, and received therefore no aid from
demonstration. Now these obstacles are in great mea-
sure overcome, the value of the study is daily rising in
public estimation ; and in London at any rate lectures
on Physiology* can be attended without difficulty, while
elementary works of a high character are within the
student's reach.

And now supposing a young woman to have gone
through such a course of study, it remains for her to
learn something of the practical applications of the
physiological knowledge she has acquired. She is no
longer in ignorance of the great principles on which
organic life depends, nor of the structure of that frame
"so fearfully and wonderfully made," the consideration

* See Calendar of Classes open to Women in London, published
monthly in the Women's Education Journal.

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 73

of which deepen ed in the mind of the Psalmist his sense
of awe and reverence for God. Blunders such as the
ignorant fall into every day, and by which they under-
mine their own health and imperil that of the hapless
children depending on their care, would be, it is hoped,
impossible for them ; but there is a wide difference
between such general application of principles and the
skilful ordering of minute daily trifles .in obedience to
them, which is essential to prevent illness, or to assist
in restoring health. Scientific study does not aim at
giving a knowledge of practical details, and a great deal
of mere necessary common-place information must come
in to guide us here, which would be totally out of place
in a lecture-room. The essential principles of good
sanitary conditions are easily deduced from physiology;
but to bring our knowledge to bear in our own house-
holds, much special acquaintance with methods of
ventilating and cleansing within and without our walls
is indispensable, and requires to be practically studied ;
and no person is fit to have the management of a house-
hold, and, therefore to be responsible for its general
health, as far as local influences are concerned, who has
not so studied this important question. This, like some
other portions of the argument of these papers, may
seem in contradiction with the ordinary practice of life —
with the marriages out of the school-room that we daily
see, the child of yesterday placed in a position of trust
and responsibility to-morrow ; but the contradiction, I
venture to assert, tells against the marriages, not against
the studies I urge as the technical training for any such
position.

I believe that the most thorough mode of studying

74 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

practically the difficult subject we are considering is
by attendance in a hospital. A mother who has been
thoroughly trained herself, and must have gained
largely through her varied experience of her own family
cares, could of course give much valuable instruction to
her daughter ; and, if -this were seriously done, it might
be in some measure a substitute for the more systematic
instruction of hespital practice. Still, where the latter
is attainable, there can be no doubt that knowledge may
be acquired there in a few months or weeks, which it
might be years before home experience afforded the
opportunity of learning. It is quite clear that whatever
else women do from choice or necessity in this busy
world, the internal economy of our homes and the care
of the sick must fall to them. Nursing has in all times
been a feminine calling, and for that reason probably
supposed to require no knowledge. The religious devo-
tion of Catholic sisterhoods first showed a better example,
and, for some years past, great efforts have been made
to raise that invaluable art out of the contemptible
condition into which it had fallen. What we owe in
this respect to Miss Nightingale it needs no words of
mine to point out, and I cannot do better than direct
attention to her " Notes on Nursing " to show what I
mean by the practical study I wish to recommend. For
nursing, all the ordinary precautions about ventilation
and cleanliness are carried to their furthest extreme,
and it is thus that their habitual ordinary value is best
illustrated : and for this reason, a hospital where these
things are systematically and permanently attended to
upon scientific principles, is the best school for learning
them.

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 75

In the same manner, although painful experience
trains any thoughtful person into a good nurse at home,
the first patients suffer while the experience is slowly
gathered, and, after all, the field is a narrow one ; the
appearance of some new form of illness, or some accident
calling for precautions different from any we have been
obliged to use before, makes us feel very helpless at a
moment when helplessness is a heavy addition to our
cares. The wide practice of a hospital teaches more of
these things in a few weeks than home experience in as
many years, and it gives the knowledge before it is
needed for use, before we have felt our heart ready to
break, as we stood ignorant and incapable in sight of the
suffering of one we love. All the skilful modes of moving
a sick person, of bed-making, and other forms of personal
attendance under the difficulties of serious illness — the
best position for a patient under given circumstances
(a matter which after an accident is often of supreme
importance) — the minute care about medicines — the
mode of preparing and applying external remedies — the
preparation of sick-room food ; all these are learnt in
the best way in a hospital, because they are seen in
regular operation, and above all, perhaps, because the
mind is free to learn while the heart is not wrung with
home affliction.

The mere orderly ways of professional nursing carried
into home practice would make a difference of the most
important kind. To know what to leave undone is
often as important as to know what to do, and how
much fuss, and hurry, and vain expenditure of labour
and exertion are saved thereby ! The thorough study
of nursing so as to be fit for a responsible office is a long

76 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

and serious one, and obviously not to be undertaken by
all : but such a study as would enable young women to
enforce the practical application of the principles they
have learnt, that would enable them to watch all light
home cases with intelligence, and to know (no slight
thing) when higher skill is required ; which would give
them practical knowledge of the best conditions for
baffling disease, all this might be learnt by a person duly
prepared in the course of two or three months' atten-
dance at a hospital, and we may be certain that time so
spent will never be regretted.

Whatever the task future life may bring, whether the
care of infancy or of old age, or nursing through some
fearful period when an epidemic has invaded an other-
wise healthy household, the woman so instructed will look
back with thankfulness to the training which has doubled
her usefulness in time of need. No one denies the duty or
doubts its importance ; only according to the character-
istic method of viewing matters connected with women,
they are expected to knmv when their knowledge is
wanted, but not to be taught.

II. MENTAL PHILOSOPHY

The second subject on our list of essentials for the
Higher Education of Women is Mental Philosophy,
The words may sound alarming to many, and when
we remember that they might cover the whole ground
of Ethics and Metaphysics, we may partly excuse the
alarm ; but though I use the term because it rightly
designates the study I recommended, it is only a por-

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

tion of it that can be called essential, or that minds
not naturally metaphysical can be expected to enter
into. Shakespeare distinguishes man as " looking before
and after/' and doubtless these faculties of memory and
forethought are among the foremost of essentially
human gifts. But man also looks within ; conscious-
ness, that may also be called the birth of the divine, in
the race so nearly allied to lower species, is hardly
awakened before the strange world of self, so distinct
from the other strange world around, attracts attention;
and in proportion to the reflective power of each mind,
it becomes more and more a subject of study, a ground-
work of self-improvement.

To each one of us, then, the science that deals with
the peculiarities of our mental organisation, that syste-
matizes the observations founded on our own conscious-
ness, and shows their connection and their tendencies,
is a study of great importance; but to those who under-
take the work of education it is indispensable, and
therefore must be so to women, the educators of the
race by right divine.

Of all earthly sights none so carry us beyond the
sphere of the present, to the infinite, the ideal, the
immortal, as the lifeless form resting in the first solemn
beauty of Death, and the infant sleeping in the cradle.
All human possibilities rush through the mind, and
almost overpower us as we gaze on one or the other.
There the toil, the joy, the wrong-doing, the victory,
are all over, secured or missed in this life for ever.
Here all that may make life a blessing or a curse, all
that may link it to the angels, or to the lower animals,
whose appetites it will share — all lies folded in uncon-

78

HIGHEE EDUCATION OF WOMEN

scions helplessness. The whole passage from the one
to the other is what education must influence and
direct. It is that helplessness we have to help, that
unconsciousness we must assist to transform into the
fulness of mental life. But how shall this be done if
we have no distinct aim, no knowledge of the processes
to be used, of the powers we may call up to aid us ?
Truly the mental, like the bodily faculties, will develope
and acquire strength according to certain natural laws
of growth ; but jnst as in the course of that develop-
ment many a slight bodily infirmity becomes illness
from neglect, many a delicate frame is crippled through
ignorant treatment, so with the mind ; tendencies that
might have been the seeds of virtue, become fruitful of
evil ; association and habit, the educator's all-powerful
allies, make after-education well-nigh impossible when
allowed to sway in childhood, undirected or misdirected;
the conscience, the moral-law giver, assumes no empire,
because no care has made the inner voice distinct, and
caused the faint lines in which the law of duty is writ-
ten on every human heart, to stand forth bold and clear
when brought out by the light of truth and knowledge,
as the words traced in invisible ink seem to start to life
when the rays of heat fall upon them.

The study here urged as essential to all women is
that which will give this directing power ; which will
enable them to detect mental symptoms as they should
detect symptoms of physical disturbance, to read ten-
dencies and know how to strengthen or counteract
them, to cultivate the will and discipline it to obedi-
ence, first to a wiser human will, later to the voice
of conscience speaking the will of the Highest ; to take

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 79

care that authority should not cramp, that freedom
should not become lawless, that the powerful chain of
association should be so forged link by link, that each
should strengthen the other and give security to future
endeavours ; that the mighty sway of habit should be
so controlled that it may become, not a tyrant master-
ing freer aspiration, but a minister to lessen the toil
and overcome the difficulties of life; that childish
observation and curiosity may be made to bear their
natural fruit of love of knowledge and intelligent in-
terest in the world around ; that the strong affections
in which infant life is cradled, should become the type
of Divine love, parental rule the earthly voice of the
Father in Heaven ; — this is the task for which every
woman must fit herself, if she would not perhaps some
day rue with bitter self-accusation her unh'tness for the
office to which Nature herself has called her.

I know that many will be inclined to smile at any
philosophical view of the mother's early training, and
think that it may be trusted to love and common sense.
Unfortunately that trust in common sense is always
the refuge of those who find it inconvenient to acquire
knowledge. We never find, as Whately puts it, that
the seamen believe common sense will suffice to steer
a ship, or that the cook admits the power of common
sense to make a pudding ; and so on through all the
range of human action, those who know contend for
knowledge ; those who are ignorant put in the lazy
claim for common sense. Love, doubtless, has a power
of its own, for, if very strong, it intensifies observation
on all that relates to the loved object, and thus far
increases knowledge; but till we find the physician

80 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

acknowledging that maternal love will suffice to combat
disease, or to ward off constitutional peril, we see no
grounds for expecting that the same love will be more
powerful in the task of securing the healthy balance of
the moral and intellectual nature.

AD other refuge of those who oppose these views is to
banish mental training till school life begins — in other
words, they would spend the first nine or ten years in
preparing new difficulties for the next ten. 1 shall
enter* more fully into this subject when I come to con-
sider the Kinder-garten system, the only philosophical
method of early education ; here we are only pointing
out the grounds on which we base our proposition of
the indispensable necessity of the study of mental
philosophy to women ; in other words, the study of the
moral and intellectual faculties that it must be their
task first to train for the duties and work of life. If, as
I before said, the mere teacher can do only half his
work when devoid of this knowledge, how much more
does she require it who must educate as well as teach,
mould the life as well as direct the outward routine.

And now, just as I spoke of the training needed to
make a study of physiology serve ite practical purpose
in such matters as the supeiintendence of sanitary
arrangements and the care of the sick, so here we have
to consider the mode of bringing the principles of psy-
chology learnt in books to bear upon the practical
work of education. We cannot say of either of these,
great subjects that their practical purpose gives them

* This section was originally published before the Kinder-garte1
series, \vhich comes first in this volume.

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 81

their highest interest to the student. The metaphysi-
cian and the biologist may never be called upon to bring
a single law of either science to bear in actual dealing
with their fellow-creatures, while the engrossing interest
of the speculation remains the same; but to society the
practical application is of the highest importance, and
the most essential duties of woman's natural vocation
depend on her being able to apply them rightly and
intelligently. It is not enough to one who may have
the whole welfare of a helpless child cast into her
hands, to read about the intellectual and moral facul-
ties of man. She must learn to watch the early mani-
festations of such faculties, and to use each resource
that the mental nature affords, to direct and control,
to plant and to weed out, to form links for future
action, to preserve freedom in the midst of protecting
care. Infinite pains, infinite patience, minute observa-
tion and careful regard for the future in the midst of
the difficulties of the present, all these are wanted ; and
it may be said that they are easiest acquired and prac-
tised when to all other things is added the infinite love
which in the mother destroys the feeling of weariness
or disgust. In one sense this is true, and to that love
is it due that, in spite of unfathomable ignorance, much
has been done; but some early practice before the heart
is interested, leaves in this case, as in that of nursing,
the intellect more free and active to acquire knowledge;
and, so far as there is any truth in what we hear so
often said, that mothers are not the best teachers of
their own children, it is because too-anxious affection
troubles the judgment. There is an intense wish to do
right, with a sense of ignorance and a recognition of

82 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

frequent failure, which the ignorance is just as likely to
exaggerate as to lessen ; and should some little excite-
ment or undue emotion follow, these quickly tell upon
the child, and every difficulty is increased. Then
friends repeat, ' Mothers cannot teach/ while the truth
is only, that inexperienced teachers cannot do good
work any more than inexperienced cooks, or inexperi-
enced statesmen. So, as the first patients suffer while
self-taught experience is gathered in the sick-room,
elder children suffer while wisdom is painfully learnt
for the benefit of the younger. But this need not be
so if education were kept seriously before the eyes of
young women as a work they must fit themselves for ;
and if, in order to that fitness, they not only made some
study of mental philosophy, but also watched the prac-
tical application of the laws and principles of the science
in the actual work of education. No better mode of
doing this for their special purpose could probably be
found than by going through a course of training in a
Kinder-garten school, where the early age of the pupils
obliges the teachers to go to first principles, and gives
the actual experience which the future mother will first
need herself.

In the working of more advanced schools, though an
immense deal might be learned, supposing the teaching
to be really good, yet the instruction which, for various
reasons not strictly educational, must then be given, is
no longer so favourable to the special object we have in
view ; and the intellectual is almost always more pro-
minent than the moral discipline, thus so far causing
a break in the true harmony of education. Now wjth
the infant pupils of the Kinder-garten neither of these

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 83

difficulties exists. The knowledge given has one sole
purpose, that of training the feeble effort to learn. The
discipline must be moral, for the moral nature is the
more developed at that age, and without appealing to
that no effort of the budding intelligence would be
made at all. A school-boy, though he is in a state of
sulkiness or other ill-temper, or though he hates his
teacher, or thinks himself unjustly treated; may see that
it is to his interest to learn his lesson, but a little child
is simply unable under such circumstances to do so. If
the moral atmosphere be disturbed, he cannot reason
himself into action, and he does not work at all. Thus
the most important principles of a mother's teaching
are imperatively acted upon in the Kinder-garten, and
that invaluable secret of true education, preserving the
harmonious balance of the faculties, is revealed to the
young teacher.

F rebel's system has not as yet taken the place it de-
serves in England, and therefore when we speak of a
Kinder-garten many people think only of the boxes of
toys they have perhaps bought and found of little use,
not dreaming that the failure was in their own mode of
using the instruments, without learning the principle
they involved. The question, however, is not whether
the Kinder-garten games are the best that could have
been devised, but that no other system of early education
has ever been scientifically grounded. I might say that
no other system of education at all has ever been worked
out both morally and intellectually, on scientificprinciples;
but, at any rate, the early education is the best for study .
Learning to begin in the right track is that which is so
unspeakably important, not only for its present "results,

$4 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

but for the saving of after-labour ; and is, I must once
more repeat, the very work that most concerns women
socially and professionally. It is this moulding of the
whole nature in its earliest development which must he
done by them or be left undone, and it is this which
young women would learn by attending a Kinder-garten
better than by any reading, although the reading ought
by no means to be omitted. Even should they not
afterwards follow the exact practice, they will have had
their eyes open to the importance of many things
which they had never dreamed of before. When it is
seen how carefully and how philosophically Frobel's
system is directed to make all the natural activity of
the child conduce to an educational purpose, how simply
the germ of the qualities we most need to cultivate — of
observation, love of knowledge, industry — is trained out
of the child's curiosity about external things and wish
to exercise its own activity, it will be acknowledged that
to all who may have the care of children laid upon them
as the highest duty and responsibility of their lives,
some time spent in the Kinder-garten will be worth a
much longer period spent over books ; or rather that
what the latter can teach will be likely to bear more
valuable fruit for being tested and practised in the former.
Nor let it be supposed that the time so spent will
be wasted, even should no after-practice of the system
ever be required. Various acquirements that are indis-
pensable to the Kinder-garten teacher, such as perfect
familiarity with the early portions of geometry, know-
ledge of natural objects, and of the first principles of
natural science, and of arts and manufactures, so as
to be able to explain and illustrate them, the familiar

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 85

practice of certain forms of drawing, and, above all,
the habit of analyzing mental operations and of following
the logical sequence of the whole method, will be found
rich in future utility, even should the student never
have occasion to devote another hour to the labour of
education. The process by which she will have learnt
to train the observing arid reasoning faculties of young
children will assuredly have strengthened her own,
while the practical application of principles of psycho-
logy must be full of interest and instruction to every
human being, whatever the after-course of their lives.

3. SOCIAL ECONOMY

The third subject pointed out as 'indispensable for
the higher education of women/ was political, or, as it
is frequently termed now, social economy. The latter
name is in several respects perhaps the best ; it points
to the wide range of interest that should come under
consideration, and thus indicates at once that higher
ground is taken than that of the mere profit-and-loss
views which have too often given a hard and narrow
aspect to economical doctrines. The only objection to
the new name is that it seems to be used almost exclu-
sively when women are addressed, while men pursue
their study, and the great masters write under the old
title of political economy. If, therefore, this change is
a euphuism, an attempted disguise in order to present a
serious study sub rosd to women, I, for one, would re-
pudiate the term, not only from a general dislike to all
special adaptation of subjects for women, but also
because political subjects are among those to which it is

86 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

peculiarly desirable to turn their attention more than it
ever has been turned hitherto. Any avoidance of the
term ' political/ for the sake of soothing prejudice, would
therefore not only be weak, but wrong. But having
made this protest, it is time to see what are the prac-
tical reasons that make this branch of the new science
of sociology so indispensable for the higher education of
women. These are to be found, first, in their position,
as rulers of households and controllers of family expen-
diture ; secondly, in their frequent intercourse with the
poor.; thirdly, in their indirect influence on public
questions.

A woman, whether married or single, who has the
management of a household thrown upon her hands,
becomes an employer of labour, and the questions which
on a large scale threaten the peace of society, affect, in
one shape or another, the well-being of every home.
She spends money for the advantage of others, and if in
a position to spend largely, her example will tell favour-
ably or unfavourably upon those ever-recurring questions
of allowable or criminal luxury, of remunerative or un-
remunerative expenditure, of the real character of sav-
ing and of extravagance ; and the habits formed by
young people growing up under her guidance in right
or wrong associations on those points, will affect the
whole tenor of their lives and their subsequent influence
on society. It is futile, indeed, to imagine that it suf-
fices for a father to be wise on subjects such as these ; if
he be counteracted by the ignorance or the frivolous
habits of the mother, his views will go for very little.
They may be recalled in later years, but the opinion
that will have the strength of motive in early youth will

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 87

be that which, bound up with feeling, as home-bred
opinions generally are, has grown up insensibly from
a powerful association almost unconsciously formed.
Right or wrong, for good or for evil, mothers do so form
associations which connect action in such matters with
duty, or with pleasure, with the habit of seeking the
right path, or of indolently acquiescing in prevailing
custom ; and it is because they do so that it would be
hard to calculate how far the national life of England
has been impoverished by women's ignorance of matters
affecting the public welfare. The second consideration
that makes political economy of great importance to
women is that its doctrines affect the whole subject of
charities, our dealings with the poor and the labouring
classes generally. Women are all, more or less, occupied
with such questions ; many, such as clergymen's wives,
bringing their influence to bear upon them daily in a
position of quasi authority ; but if left to deal ignorantly
with them, they must do mischief — social mischief, in
spreading and rooting the evils our better knowledge is
striving to eradicate — religious mischief, by bringing
down upon the great Christian virtue of charity the
scorn of those who hold scientific truth. When women
shall have mastered the needful worldly knowledge,
they may find it to be their mission to show forth how
such knowledge can be made to help the work laid upon
the disciples of Him who ' went about doing good.'

An enormous proportion of the voluntary labour done
among the poor is done by women, and it would seem
almost absurd even to ask if it can be supposed that
the same zeal, applied upon right principles, and with
that order and method that belong to well-instructed

88 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

minds, would not produce a very different effect from
that which we generally behold. Women are less
amenable to the influence of superior knowledge in
this matter than they are to the common-place clerical
influence, because the latter appeals to feelings which
they do understand, while the former appeals to a range
of ideas unfamiliar to them. Knowledge is valued by
those who have knowledge enough to see why it should
hold sway ; while ignorance is stubborn, simply because
it is ignorant. Yet people continually wonder that those
who know nothing should not recognise that great prin-
ciple of the rightful sway of wisdom.

The combined ignorance and mistaken piety of our
fathers formerly brought the labouring population of
England nigh to a state of general pauperism, and the
same causes still combine to perpetuate in some mea-
sure the same evils. Indolent philanthropists, clergy-
men, and women acting under their influence, are those
who continually place hindrances in the way of a more
healthy state of things.

In the early days of Romanist corruption, almsgiving
was preached as an easy substitute for Christian morals ;
in these latter days it is still commended as Christian
charity ; and the efforts of those who would introduce a
better system are denounced and often frustrated on
the authority of Scripture texts applying to a wholly
different condition of society. Yet, if ever the nation is
to be taught thrift and independence — in other words,
is to be raised from a degraded to a comparatively
moral condition — it will be thanks to the disciples of
that economic science which has been condemned as
teaching harshness to the poor and forgett'ulness of

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 89

duty to the rich. Study of the real principles of the
science will make evident how much remains to be
done by individual effort in the truest spirit of charity
among our more ignorant brethren; how much edu-
cated women especially, in going among the poor, can
do to lessen their ignorance on these matters, to remove
the feeling that such dealings are dictated by harsh-
ness, to teach the women of the working classes, and
through them to influence the men. How much might
be done in this manner towards increasing savings and
diminishing strikes it is difficult to estimate ; and when
any subject is of such wide application that to have due
influence it needs to take root at home, we may. rest
assured that it is only through the instrumentality of
women we shall attain the purpose.

The widest application of sound doctrines on these
subjects has been that worked out by the Charity Orga-
nization Society ; and if women wish to learn what may
be done by ardent charity rightly directed, let them
inquire into the labour of Miss Octavia Hill ; see foul
dens turned into healthy homes, a pauper population
raised to honest independence, by the combination
(alas ! so rare) of true philanthropy and true know-
ledge, in her who was at once their teacher and their
practical helper.

The success that has attended the efforts of the ladies
who, in connection with the Yorkshire Board of Educa-
tion, have lectured to poor women on domestic economy
and the laws of health as applied to the care of dwell-
ings and of children, affords another example of what
we may hope to see accomplished when sound know-
ledge shall enlighten the charity in which women have

90 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN"

never been defective. Hundreds of poor mothers have
gathered at work meetings and other places to learn
from those ladies, and have so quickly felt the value of
the knowledge imparted that they themselves spread
the fame of the lecturer, and bring friends and relations
to listen.

This is true charity, but it cannot be practised by the
ignorant.

Lastly, women exercise, whether we will or no, an
immense indirect influence on political life. That alone
points out the importance of turning their minds to
the sober study of such questions ; they will affect them
somehow or other, ignorantly or wisely, according as
they are prepared. We do not here enter into political
questions, strictly so called ; but the consideration of
whether or not women should learn to take a serious
and large interest in political action — that is, in public
action involving the national welfare — is distinctly an
educational question, and that the study of political
economy will turn the attention to the wider field of
national life in all its aspects is one of the reasons that
makes it educationally valuable. Hitherto the interest
of women in politics has generally been personal, and
has, therefore, risen to fever-heat in times of war or of
parliamentary or electioneering excitement, to sink to
zero in those times of far more enduring national
importance when all the forces of society are acting
undisturbed, when the working of opinion is like the
rJow of a full, deep stream, not the noisy fury of the
torrent in its momentary excitement, and the results
of action are far-reaching and deep-seated rather than
brilliant. In such times the tone of public feeling in

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 91

men also is too often far from being a high one ; and
if it be so, if patriotism which would kindle at the
approach of a storm cools while a nation is gliding into
danger, it may be attributed not a little to that very
fact of women's indifference to and ignorance of poli-
tics. Women quickly feel the grandeur of heroic action
or character, and the generation succeeding one that
has lived through the fearful excitement of a great war
grows up under the home influence of patriotic senti-
ment. The mother's strong emotions have worked upon
he'r sons ; and this may be no inconsiderable cause —
though one hitherto unnoticed by historians — of the
active public progress that is generally made by a nation
after a period -of trial and suffering. But emotion dies
away ; women return to the apathy of ignorance, and
hence the next generation does not bear from home into
the world those watchwords of public duty, love of coun-
try, self-sacrifice for a noble cause, which were echoed
from every hearth when the women's hearts were stirred.
Truly, men who wish right principles to become a
moving power in society, and neglect the aid of women
in enforcing them, are not unlike one who should spend
his force on hammering cold iron, while neglecting the
furnace at his hand, whose glow would make that thank-
less toil easy and effective. In one momentous subject
only has it been generally allowed that women have
necessarily the same interest as men ; and with regard
to this, history teaches us some instructive lessons. If
the early Christians had disdained the co-operation of
women, how many more generations would have passed
away ere the religion of the Cross had driven from homes
and temples the impure rites of the ancient gods ! If

92 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

Luther and the other great reformers had been content
to leave women outside the movement, to abandon
them to the ignorance and the spiritual subjection
which they cast off themselves, how much longer would
the era of religious freedom have been delayed !

This age in which we live is essentially one of social
reform — reform needing the united action of unselfish
feeling and of sound knowledge based on scientific
truth, and carried forward on that ' wave of emotion '
which transforms conviction into motive ; and therefore
it is that the subtle and powerful influence of women is
so much needed as an instrument of national welfare,
"and that the study that peculiarly deals with social
questions is one of the indispensable studies for their
higher education.

Having thus briefly considered the three studies
I have pointed out as essential to the higher educa-
tion for women, it remains, finally, to say a few words
to guard myself against misunderstanding, owing to
the apparent exclusion of subjects more generally
valued.

The term 'higher education' is intended, as said
before, to designate the instruction given after school
age, the course of studies which, like the university or
professional education of men, does more or less
discipline the maturer faculties, and prepare for the
actual business of life. It is evident, therefore, that
the three subjects named could have no pretension to
be a complete curriculum of such studies. Viewed as
discipline only, whatever subjects the experience of
generations has pointed out as best for strengthening
and developing the various powers of the mind in the

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 98

one sex, must be equally fitted to promote the same
purpose for the other; but I am far from believing
that the same course must necessarily be followed.
On the contrary, the more principles of education are
studied, the more will it be recognised that methods are
of so much more importance than subjects, that a true
educator will make any simple pursuit, the means of
which may be nearest at hand, do more towards
drawing out and strengthening the faculties of his
pupils, than is often done by the process of qualifying
for university honours through the study of some of the
highest subjects on which the human intellect can be
employed. With regard to training for the business of
life, whenever women obtain an entrance into any
profession, the studies requisite for that will become
the school of higher education for them, as for men;
but the peculiarity in their case which made me point
out as essential the three subjects above mentioned, is
that great fact of nature which assigns to women one
special calling requiring careful training of the highest
kind apart from any other study, whether of choice or
profession, that they engage in. If a man marries, his
active life in the world remains unaltered ; but marriage
to a woman, even if it should not withdraw her from
any money-making calling she may have followed as
single, will probably open up new duties, adding another
profession at home to that which she has studied for
out of home. And it is this peculiar position, for which
the course of higher culture indicated in these pages is
intended to prepare. Physiology and Mental Philo-
sophy, bearing evidently and directly on education,
which in that new home-calling becomes the woman's

94 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

first great duty ; and the third, Political Economy,
referring to her obligation as a member of society, as a
citizen of the state, which women are too apt to forget,
but which in the position of heads of households it is no
longer pardonable to overlook.

Thus, I repeat, these three subjects occupy peculiar
ground and legitimately claim to be essential, as
distinguished from others which are nevertheless
eminently desirable in any complete view of higher
culture.

No subject can be chosen from the vast range of
knowledge and of human interests that may not with
advantage find a place in studies having such culture
for its object.

Those most generally in favour are History and
Literature, and it is difficult to overrate their value.
Literature, the highest product of our great human gift
of language, the inheritance bequeathed by each nation
from generation to generation of its people, treasuring
the tradition of the past, and enriched as time flows on
with all that fresh knowledge and new views of thought
or imagination have given to feed or delight the human
soul, — literature is the highest manifestation of the—-
spirit of man speaking to present and future genera-
tions : and to discuss the value of such a study, whether
pursued through one language or through several, is
like discussing the value of feeling the beauties of
Nature, or the grandeur of heroic action ; it is simply
above discussion.

Till the field of knowledge grew so rich that men
were forced to confess the impossibility of compassing
all, and the difficulty of choosing the best, and till the

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 95

money value of knowledge had introduced new and
fallacious tests to direct the choice, none doubted the
supreme value of letters in education ; and no man
born to the inheritance of such a literature as our own
could, without something like treason to his country,
undervalue its influence now. Yet in rny opinion it
scarcely in the present day holds its legitimate place
in education or in society.

History has no such wide, indisputable claim upon
our affections as have those poetic creations, those
utterances of wisdom, that literature has preserved for
us through ages past ; but it is to all who study human
nature a source of imperishable interest. There, the
psychologist, the educator, the politician, find the
examples and illustrations of the great principles they
inculcate ; there, on a great scale, we see the passions,
the poetry, the base selfishness, the sublime self-
devotion, of which we study the springs and seek to
direct the movements in the government of nations
and in the training of each human being. To women
especially, whose actual experience is generally so
limited, the study of history is invaluable; it is im-
possible to find a substitute for it in the labour of
directing young minds from individual to general
interests; from idiosyncrasies to great human character-
istics; from small and narrow views of the world and of
duty, to large considerations of order and law, and
moral purpose over-riding all selfish, schemes of parties
or of nations. Other grounds for the value of history
there are in abundance, but these are enough. So
long as we value our place in the great human family ;
so long as we recognise an inheritance from the past,

96 HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

or labour in hope of progress for the future, so long
must history be one of the subjects which claim an
honoured place in every system of higher education.

I have spoken of these two subjects as the most
common and the most popular of those generally pro-
posed for lectures, merely to prevent my being supposed
to undervalue them. Of less popular ones, such as
logic, or physical science, or mathematics, I might be
yet more inclined to speak, owing to their very un-
popularity, but, as before said, my purpose is not to
frame any complete curriculum of higher studies. These
are in large measure better left to choice. Each
subject thoroughly studied becomes necessarily the
centre of many inquiries and interests. Each of the
three subjects, for instance, mentioned as essential,
would lead the student into a wide field of connected
subjects — Political Economy, appealing to History ;
Human Physiology, opening the way to Comparative
Physiology and to Natural History in its many branches,
and to Geology as the record of past history and changes
— the mere study of Kinder-garden education turning
the mind not only to natural history, but to physical
science and mathematics, and to art, the elements
of which the teacher must have thoroughly mastered,
while any one portion of these various studies can be
followed up more fully as inclination may direct. The
range is wide enough, and choice cannot be too free.
Holding on certain definite grounds a few studies to
be indispensable, I would exclude none. So long as
essentials are never lost sight of, let us add as much
vigorous discipline of the understanding in other
directions, as many more graces of high culture,

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 97

as time, or means, or occasion may permit. Our object,
in short, is not to limit, but simply to insure that one
indispensable harvest shall be reaped before labour is
diverted to new fields and more varied cultivation ; to
remind women that whatever their chosen path of
activity, they have one God -given mission whose claims
siusi be paramount to all.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX*

SOME DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED WITH
KINDER-GARTEN TEACHING IN ENGLAND

THE introduction of Frobel's system into this country is
attended by some peculiar difficulties, to which it may
not be useless to draw attention in order that its friends
may be prepared to meet them. They spring from its
foreign origin, which makes its naturalisation among us
slow and troublesome. These difficulties may be classed
under two heads, the want of teachers and the want of

* Many of the remarks in this appendix are in somo degree out of
date ; but I let them stand, because it is in detail only, not in the
spirit, that they are now inaccurate ; the difficulties remain the same,
and must still be met in the same manner. The training of English
teachers, so strongly insisted upon here, has been prosecuted with zeal ;
and though the success has not yet been such as we hoped, the com-
parative failure has been from causes which only experience could
bring to light, ami which we hope to deal with more successfully in
the future. So with regard to the certificates given by the Frobel
Society, on the results of independent examination, we are as much
convinced as ever that this is the right method, and any partial
failure has been owing to the inevitable slowness of working a new
system, and to cau.se?, altogether foreign to our original design.

102 APPENDIX

books ; to which we may add a third, the reluctance in
England to believe that considerable training and
knowledge can be wanted for the teachers of little
children from three to seven or eight years old. A few
words, then, upon each of these points may be useful
here. I shall quote mainly from an address I had
occasion to make some weeks ago to the Frobel Society,
pointing out these difficulties to them as marking the
direction in which, as it seemed to me, their immediate
exertions should tend.

The first difficulty we have to overcome is that of
procuring Kinder-garten mistresses, and with all due
respect for the admirable foreign teachers who are work-
ing among us, it must be admitted that in order to
popularise the system, to make it take root in this
country, it must be worked by English women. Hither-
to, in most cases, when it has been desired to establish
a Kinder-garten, the difficulty of getting an English
mistress has been the great obstacle. Some enterprising
persons have sent over to Germany for teachers, but
naturally they come speaking a foreign language with-
out ease, and are unfamiliar with all the surroundings
of the children, whereas a teacher should be familiar
with every detail which goes to build up the child's
mental life. This difficulty is felt with mere servants,
who are brought over to talk a foreign language to
children. Yet they live in the same house and quickly
familiarise themselves with its circumstances, while the
schoolmistress lives apart and only meets her little
pupils at stated hours, so that a long time must elapse
before she can bridge over the distance between them.
Some persons have planned sending English girls to be

APPENDIX 103

trained in Germany, but there the difficulty of the
language meets us again. The proposed students per-
haps know nothing of German, at best they know it
from school teaching only, and much time is wasted
before they can derive full benefit from the special
training they have gone to seek. We shall never
make wide progress till these obstacles are removed.
The system cannot acquire vigour among us till it has
a native growth, until then it will be only as an exotic,
needing care and propping up amid the free and hardy
vegetation native to the soil.

Closely connected with this part of the work of the
Society is that of using its influence to ensure that
Kinder-garten teachers are not only duly instructed in
their special office, but that they are as far as possible
well-educated women. The wider the culture any mind
has received, the greater its aptitude for recognising
and acting upon philosophical principles ; and con-
versely, the narrower the culture the greater the in-
capacity for going beyond the rule of thumb, and often
the greater the aversion to even recognising that there
may be something beyond it. In all departments of
instruction it is essential that the teacher should not
be a mere recipient and detailer of knowledge, that he
or she should draw from a living spring, not from a
rarely-filled tank ; but in teaching little children,
especially in using a method in which every detail is
part of a connected, logical whole, it is more than ever
necessary that the teacher should speak from a full
mind, that her own observations or reading should
supply her with illustrations, her own knowledge enable
her to answer the questions which the children will

104

APPENDIX

ask, and which they will certainly not often put in
the convenient form which will allow the answers of
text-books to be given. The child's nature unfolds
spontaneously, and the teachers must be able spon-
taneously also to meet the requirements of that growth.
The course of instruction for Kinder-garten teachers
ranges over so large an area that in itself it forces a
considerable amount of knowledge. The best authori-
ties are agreed that it should form a two years' course
of study, the first given to acquiring thorough mastery
of Frobel's theory and of the occupations through which
it is applied in teaching, and also that amount of
instruction in various branches of knowledge which are
requisite for the teachers; the second to be spent in
practical work as an assistant in a Kinder-garten.
Owing to the scarcity of training-classes, and the still
greater scarcity of good Kinder-gartens in which the
year of probation would be profitably spent, both these
conditions are difficult. Another difficulty arises from
ignorance or prejudice, too generally prevailing in the
English public. We are apt to be very impatient of
preliminary study, we want quick and ready methods,
and are too apt to take an ill-made by-path for a high
road to knowledge. We readily concede an apprentice-
ship of several years for a mere handicraft, but grudge
half the time to that noblest of crafts which fashions
the human creature for the work and duties of life, for
service to God and man. There is among many people
a notion that girls who have left school unfit to become
ordinary governessess, may easily by a few lessons in the
art of using Frobel's 'gifts,' turn their insignificance
to account in a Kinder-garten ; but every effort of this

APPENDIX 105

Society should be used against such a fearful subversion
of its objects, remembering that the Kinder-garten is
either an indifferent infant school or the practical appli-
cation of the only philosophical system yet devised,
according to the hands into which it falls.

A training-school for Kinder-garten teachers has been
at work for three years in Manchester, and certificates
for first-class mistresses are given to the successful
candidates after a two years' course of study and practice,
and for second-class or assistant mistresses to those who
reach a lower point of attainment. In like manner it
has been decided that examinations shall be held under
the auspices of the Frobel Society for students trained
in any of the different classes now at work, and for any
others who may present themselves after private study,
and wish to have their qualification tested. Certificates
will be granted according to the result of the examina-
tion. An opportunity is thus afforded of taking some
important steps towards establishing a standard of
efficiency for English Kinder-garten teachers, including
the degree of general knowledge which is the necessary
preliminary of all special or professional culture. In
France and in Germany this includes a considerable
amount ; one foreign language being required in addi-
tion to thorough grounding in the usual branches of
school instruction. With us we should probably be
obliged to place the standard lower at first, to meet the
many cases where such general knowledge has been
scantily provided for in ordinary school-teaching. But
it would be a great error to suppose that a teacher is
fitted for her work by immediate Kinder-garten training
alone. Frobel's method requires much speaking, and a

106 APPENDIX

teacher must speak fluently and correctly, which of
course she will not do without sound grammatical know-
ledge and habit of easy composition. Arithmetic is
essential to Kinder-garten teaching, and its peculiar
method of making the children discover the principles
for themselves could not be practised by one who was
not familiar with the ordinary processes. As with the
Arithmetical so with the Geometrical notions they
impart, the teacher must be acquainted with the subject
in its proper form before she will draw from the
exercises with cubes and the drawing of geometrical
figures, all the lessons the children are made to teach
themselves under skilful guidance. The Geography
also should of course range beyond that of England,
and especially include the elements of physical geo-
graphy, which kindle the greatest interest in children,
to whom a common map is a dead letter. And in
History and Literature some proficiency would be
required, first as the essential stamp of a careful
education, and secondly, because few subjects so much
contribute to enrich the mind, to furnish it with matter
for illustration and knowledge of character, both so
essential in the work of education. The fact that teach-
ing is free in this country, i.e., that no regulations pre-
vent any ignorant pretenders from trading upon the
equal or greater ignorance of parents, is one which tends
to lower the general level of teaching power in
England. There is no necessity of working up to a
certain standard, and the best only, either of teachers or
those who employ them, are able to fix a standard for
themselves. But in a new and foreign system like this,
in regard to which the public cannot but feel their own

APPENDIX 107

ignorance, the value of a certificate of competency is
more likely to be recognised, and we may believe that
teachers who do obtain such a certificate from a Society
that gives it only on the verdict of competent and
independent examiners, will have a better prospect of
employment than others whose work shall only have
been certified by the teachers under whom they have
studied. It is said that many elementary school-
mistresses are studying the method and may come up
for examination. This deserves all encouragement, and
should be met by great indulgence in the examiners at
this early period of our undertaking. The English part
of the examination these mistresses will of course easily
pass, or their Government certificate may perhaps be
taken as exempting them from it; their difficulty is an
immense one, it is that of obtaining any sufficient
knowledge of Frobel's method through the medium
of such scanty works as we possess in English, of
acquiring the elements of physical science which are
indispensable for the Kinder-garten teacher. One
accustomed to teaching, and having had the training
which that class of teachers alone obtain in England,
would, with the help of good books, probably master
the Kinder-garten method without much difficulty, but
science is so deplorably neglected in our schools that
the botany, physiology, natural history, and elementary
physics, which are essential, will have to be studied
for the purpose ; still, in our present condition, we
must rejoice that any have zeal and courage to add
this labour to their already laborious lives, and give a
hearty welcome to their efforts.

Our object is to inoculate the country at large with

108 APPENDIX

these new principles, and elementary schoolmistresses
will afford us invaluable aid, since through them we
reach directly a very large class of children, and one for
whom the Kinder-garten is pre-eminently valuable. In
the short school life of these children there is no time
for correcting the blunders of early training, while we
may safely say that instruction given to them from seven
to ten or eleven years of age would be profitable in a
fourfold degree if their minds had been previously
trained,as they would be in the Kinder-garten, to observe,
to inquire, to work accurately, and to live in orderly
obedience and harmony. The whole nature of the child
would come in a higher state of preparation under the
influence of the ordinary schoolmaster or mistress, and
the short time they can command will be proportionately
fruitful of good results. These considerations make us
feel that every effort to introduce the system intelligently
into elementary schools should be welcomed, and every-
thing done to meet the meritorious efforts of mistresses
who study in the intervals of fatiguing daily work.
They stand in a different category from young students,
who, free as yet from the trammels of practical life, can
study under good tuition, and therefore should be ex-
pected to reach the highest efficiency, and must be
supposed ambitious to reach it.

We come next to writing as a means of spreading
knowledge of the subject. I have said that the books are
buried in a foreign language, but more, and worse than
that, they are separated from us by the strange invisible
lines of foreign thought. Nothing is easier than to have
bocks translated from one language to another, but far
different is it to lift them from one region of national

APPENDIX 109

thought and sentiment to another, and yet this must be
done in a subject like ours if we are to make real use of
the valuable materials the Germans have elaborated for
us. In matters of science and history, of classical learn-
ing or abstruse philosophy, in all of which the other
nations of Europe have borrowed so largely from the
Germans, the form of the thought as influenced by native
associations and mental habits is of comparatively little
importance, and minds habitually occupied with such
matters are fit to deal easily with minor difficulties.
But we have not only a difficult subject to study, we
require to popularise it. If we translate books it is for
the sake of the unlearned, of the young, who are neces-
sarily unable to allow for national modes of thought,
of the hard- worked teachers, whose scanty leisure for
reading is heavily overtaxed if books are made abstruse
by their method as well as their matter.

It is this difficulty which has hindered the translation
of several works that would be of great value to us.
Frobel is a difficult author to his own countrymen,
defective in style and in that methodical arrangement
of facts or speculation which, more than anything else,
makes a difficult subject clear. The valuable work of
Mde. Marenholtz Billow, on 'Labour and the New
Education,' as she calls Frobel's system, could not be
advantageously translated as it stands, because portions
of it are too alien to our modes of thought to obtain
acceptance, and would therefore hinder our purpose of
popularising the subject. The same criticism applies to
Hanschmann's exposition of the system through the
medium of a biography of Frobel, a valuable and de-
lightful book, but in which the common English reader

110 APPENDIX

unused to German views and method of rendering them,
would find much that would rather deter him from
than excite him to the study, especially when presented
in the often ill-fitting garb of translation.* Yet we
must get at the matter of these and other German
works, for the knowledge we seek is there ; and it is to
be hoped that among the friends of the system will be
found some good German scholars, persons able to read
and meditate on these German books I am speaking of, to
imbue their own minds with the doctrines they present,
and to give them to us, not in translation, when exact
translation is unadvisable, but in a truly English form ;
in writings, whose illusions and imagery, the associations
appealed to, the actions and habits quoted in illustrations,
shall be such as simple English readers will feel and
appreciate.

Should the day ever come when the Frobel Society is
more richly endowed with funds, a portion of those funds
will doubtless be devoted to aiding such publications, for
we cannot have an intelligent appreciation of the system
without full exposition of its principles. The literature
of the subject now existing in English is poor in the

* Since the above was written the work of translation has gone on
more successfully than I ventured here to anticipate. The Kinder-
garten songs I have already spoken of (p. 9). Miss Gurney has trans-
lated a considerable portion of Kohler's practical exposition of the
system. Miss Alice Christie has given us a good translation of Mde.
Von Mareuholte's "Child Nature," and will perhaps execute the diffi-
cult task of translating her larger work above-mentioned. The life of
Frobel by Miss Shirreif, a mere sketch, is founded on Hanschmann's
work, and was written with the feeling that without some knowledge
of the man himself, his work would never be more than half under-
stood.

APPENDIX 111

extreme. Nor is the study of education itself made
easily accessible to ordinary readers among us.* We
have in English many valuable writings on education
— lectures, books, essays innumerable, and some of the
highest value ; and on moral subjects, every point that
the educator has to consider has doubtless been fully
treated, but these books are often little known to the
class of readers we must principally bear in mind. If
we wish to make a study popular, to engage a largo
number of persons to take an interest in it, we must
smooth the material difficulties at least out of their path,
and not leave them to seek instruction in scattered
writings, the immediate application of which to their
particular branch of inquiry will not always be ap-
parent. For instance, most writings on education refer
to the school period, and although principles are the
same, the mind unaccustomed to inquire into principles
will not carry back to infant life the psychological
facts on which the education of a later period is founded.
Still less will it be felt at once, how much more im-
portant in an educational point of view is the period all
such works ignore than the period they are exclusively
occupied with.

This fact, recognised in principle by philosophical

* Now that the subject of education is taken up seriously by the
University of Cambridge, the study of education will assume quite a
new aspect, and will be facilitated by books and lectures on all the
subjects connected with it, apart from the direct work of the Teachers'
Training and Registration Society, whose college in London was opened
two years ago, and of the excellent lectures in connection with the
College of Preceptors who set the first example in this direction. At
Edinburgh and at St Andrews the subject of education has also been
taken up.

112

APPENDIX

writers, is brought out clearly and in a practical form
by Frobel and his school only; and therefore must these
German writings be rendered easily accessible to English
readers, if we wish their principle to exercise any wide
influence over the English public.

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