Professor Adams ends the first chapter of his delightfully witty “Herbartian Psychology” with a challenge to all educational thinkers to come out of their caves and defend their idols. Throughout the book, there is many a side-thrust at Froebel, all of a more or less disparaging nature, in spite of the humorous twinkle which has a fairly permanent abode in the eye of the writer.

Some of the accusations are tolerably sweeping, for example, that Froebelianism “as a psychology is simply non-existent”; that Froebel has failed to correlate theory and practice; that although in “The Education of Man” “we have beautiful, if obscurely expressed, truths about education,” yet the Kindergarten cannot be evolved from it, in fact “between the two there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf that Froebel has not bridged.”

But the main contention is that Froebel disapproves in theory of any interference with the natural course of development. The Froebelian teacher is thus, according to Professor Adams, reduced to the position of a “humble under-gardener” who merely watches with interest and admiration, and education becomes “a general paralysis.”

Mr. Graham Wallas, whose objections to Froebel, or at least to Froebelianism[48], as he understands it, are well known, bases these on the ground that because he was a pre-Darwinian evolutionist, Froebel was bound to overrate the importance of the innate as a factor in development, and to undervalue the other factor of environment.

Professor O’Shea disposes of Froebel in one sentence and in much the same way, as an advocate of what he calls “the doctrine of Unfoldment,” where “everything is inner and self-relating,” as opposed to the conception gained from Biology, which “implies that the business of a human being is to get properly related to the world—religious, social and physical—of which he is an integral part.”

If Froebel really believed that development is entirely from within, as stated by Professor O’Shea, or if he failed to realize the importance of the surroundings, as Mr. Graham Wallas expresses it, he would naturally disapprove of any interference, as Professor Adams says he does. The Froebelian, being thus reduced to passive watching, the mere provision of a Kindergarten would be an interference with the surroundings and a contradiction in practice of the theory of non-interference. If non-interference is really the theory propounded in “The Education of Man,” there certainly is a gulf between it and the Kindergarten, a gulf it would be difficult to bridge.

But Froebelians are not prepared to admit the premises of any of these critics. It seems to many of us that these and all similar criticisms are due to misunderstanding. This is sometimes clearly due to careless reading, and consequent want of attention to the context, but even where this is not the case, misunderstandings occur. Few, of late years, have made any real study of Froebel’s writings as a whole, such as is necessary to get at his real meaning, which is often obscured by prolixities and repetitions, and sometimes hidden among apparent trivialities.

Professor O’Shea, for example, does not seem to be aware to what extent Froebel, like himself, derived his educational aim and principles from biology. He has probably never realized the deep interest taken by Froebel in the then all-absorbing question of natural development. Clearly he has no idea that Froebel has given expression to a conception of education, practically identical with that given above which he himself draws from biology,[49] and sets in contrast with the one he unjustly attributes to Froebel.

There is no doubt whatever that Froebel laid much stress on what is innate. In his generation, he tells us the child was looked upon “as a piece of wax, or lump of clay, which man can mould into what he pleases.” Because Froebel was a student of biology he knew better. He knew, as we have seen, that human beings have instincts, innate tendencies or dispositions differing from those of the lower animals chiefly in their indefiniteness. We are not so afraid of the word “innate” nowadays, when both innate ideas and innate faculties are safely buried, and that Froebel had no dealings with these has been amply shown.

But that this stress on innate tendencies implies that the child is to unfold from within, the educator standing by passive[50], or that Froebel imagined that the developing process could go on with little or no reference to the environment, is quite another matter.

Few of Froebel’s critics have taken the trouble to look up the original German before pronouncing condemnation, and this explains part of the injustice that has been done to him. The passage upon which much, perhaps most, of the adverse criticism is based is the one in which Froebel applies to education the term “leidend,” translated “passive” in both the English, or, rather, American editions of “The Education of Man.” The translation of “leidend” as “passive” is not a happy one. Moreover, the translators have endeavoured to help the reader by dividing the text into numbered sections, a proceeding which though often helpful, sometimes tends to break the continuity of Froebel’s thought. This effect is heightened in Hailmann’s translation by the interpolated notes, however valuable as some of these are in themselves. This passage, however, opens with “therefore,” and those who take exception to it ought to have considered the preceding argument. Fair criticism looks back to see why and under what circumstances education is to be “passive or following,” as opposed to “dictating and limiting.”

In the first place, absolutely passive education is a contradiction in terms. Froebel begins by stating that:

He defines the Theory of Education as “the system of directions derived from the knowledge and study of that law to guide human beings in the apprehension of their life-work”; and the Practice of Education as “the self-active application of this knowledge in the direct development and cultivation of rational beings towards the attainment of their destiny.”

To go on from this to say, on the next page but one, that the educator is to do nothing, to stand aside and be truly passive, would be absurd.

That our word “passive” is not the equivalent of Froebel’s word “leidend,” is easily proved, for in another passage where Froebel does mean “passive” he couples “leidend” with “inactive,” and puts passive in a bracket beside it. The passage runs: “wo das Kind Äusserlich als unthÄtig, leidend (passiv) erscheint.” In the passage under discussion “passiv” does not appear at all, and “leidend” is coupled, not with “inactive,” but with “following,” and is contrasted with “dictating, limiting and interfering.”[51]

A few lines further we read how the gardener may even destroy the vine “if he fail in his work passively and attentively to follow the nature of the plant.” He cannot surely “work” and be inactively passive at the same time.

A more correct translation of “leidend” here would perhaps be “tolerant” or “suffering” in its old sense of “permitting,” “bearing with,” or having patience with.

As to immediate context, Froebel has just stated that education ought “to lift man to a knowledge of himself and mankind, to a knowledge of God and Nature, and to the pure and consecrated life conditioned thereby.” “But,” he goes on, “education must be founded on what is essential or innermost, and though the real nature of things can only be known by outer manifestations, yet it behoves the educator to be very careful how he judges, for the child that appears good outwardly, is often not really good, i.e. does not will the good from his own determination, or from love, respect for or recognition of it,” while “the outwardly rough self-willed child often has within him a vigorous struggle to do what seems to him right.” Judging from outer manifestations furnishes constant occasion for false judgments concerning the motives of children, for endless misunderstanding between parent and child, and for unreasonable demands made upon children.

And here comes the force of the conjunction: “Therefore,” says Froebel, “education, instruction and training in their fundamental principles must necessarily be tolerant, following, not dictating, not limiting or defining, not interfering.”

What is it, then, that Froebel is telling us to follow almost passively, interfering, in our ignorance, as little as possible? Simply the natural order of development, the natural instincts of childhood, which in this very passage he is arguing are as trustworthy as those of other young animals. Here, as everywhere, man can only control Nature by following, by obeying her laws.

Surely we have here a plea to “suffer (leiden) little children,” to bear with the little one, still, as Froebel describes him, “still, as it were, in the process of creation,” nay, more, a plea for the actual recognition and fostering of these instinctive tendencies which Professor Dewey calls “the foundation-stones of educational method,” rather than a recommendation to “gratify every youthful impulse,” or to stand aside altogether. For the context, the whole, is not yet complete.

Froebel goes on to say that if we are certain of any tendency to unhealthy development we are to interfere with full severity (so tritt geradezubestimmende, fordernde Erziehungsweise in ihrer ganzen Strenge ein).

And now comes a sentence apparently quite overlooked by Mr. Graham Wallas, who blames Froebel for underestimating the environment. In the mean-time, until we are sure that our interference is justifiable, “nothing is left for us to do but to bring the child into relations and surroundings in all respects adapted to him.”[52]—E., p. 11.

In many other passages Froebel shows plainly that he had no thought of the “gratifying of every youthful impulse” in the sense of individual caprice.

In his plea for monetary help to establish Kindergartens and training establishments connected with them, he complains that in existing institutions children are either “repressed and their energies crippled, or else we are confronted with the wild and uncontrollable character which results when children are uncared for and are left altogether to their own impulses.”—L., p. 159.

“Life has no room for wilfulness and whims,” he says in his Mother Songs; “Boyhood is the age of Discipline” he states in “The Education of Man.” But, as he himself sums up this discussion:

The proof of whether or not the educator has succeeded in rightly adjusting the claims of freedom and authority, Froebel expresses in words recalling Kant’s, “When the ‘Thou Shalt’ of the Law becomes the ‘I will’ of the doer, then we are free.”

To emphasize the fact that Froebel did realize the importance of environment, and to anticipate the criticism that this shortened rendering is an interpretation in the light of modern educational theories, of Froebel’s somewhat cumbrous phrases, we can turn to a passage in his later writing, part of which has been quoted elsewhere:

It is, of course, true that Froebel was pre-Darwinian in time, but it is equally true that he was post-Darwinian in many of his beliefs.

To find out whether or not his educational doctrines are really based on false or exploded theories of development, as the Criticism of Mr. Graham Wallas implies, we must gather together from Froebel’s various writings, his most important references to the subject.

The key-note to his interest in it lies probably in the yearning for unity and union in all relations, which was a part of his individuality. This may have dated back to the time when, a puzzled little mortal of eight or nine years old, he was most unwisely allowed to hear his father exhorting and rebuking his parishioners. It seemed to the boy that most of the trouble arose from the fact that human beings, and human beings alone, so far as he knew, were divided into two sexes, and he felt that he would have arranged matters differently. Comfort came to him when his older brother, by showing him the male and female flower of the hazel, gave him some idea of a great law of Nature. Strange comfort, too, it seems, for a boy not yet ten years old!

The late Mr. Ebenezer Cooke pointed out long ago[54] that Mr. Graham Wallas had not only overshot the mark in saying that “Darwin transferred the cause of development from within to without,” but that he had himself failed to draw any distinction between the facts of development, as seen in the individual, and the theory of the origin or development of species, which we associate with the names of Darwin and Wallace. Mr. Cooke pointed to Froebel’s connection with Batch, the founder of a Natural History Society, of which Goethe was a member, as showing that he was in direct touch with those who were working out the theory of development of the individual.

Froebel himself refers to this Natural History Society in his Autobiography, saying that “students,” of whom he was one, “who had shown living interest and done active work in Natural Science,” were invited to become members, and that this awoke within him “a yearning towards higher scientific knowledge.” At this time Froebel was but a youth of seventeen, with no idea that education was to be his life work. Three years later, he meets a private tutor, “a young man quite out of the common, with actively inquiring mind,” who was “especially fond of making comprehensive schemes of education.” The year after this we find him reading what he can of anthropology and history, and saying of his reading: “It taught me of man in his broad historical relations and set before me the general life of my kind as one great whole.”

One year more, and while he is looking for a situation with an architect—in spite of uneasy communing with himself as to how architecture was to be used “for the culture and ennoblement of mankind”—GrÜner claps him on the shoulder with “Give up architecture, it is not your vocation at all! Become a teacher.”

It is perhaps because Froebel passed thus from interest in biology to interest in education that at this time he gives to his own question, What is the purpose of education?—almost the identical answer that Professor O’Shea puts into the mouth of his biologist[55], and which he sets in opposition to Froebel’s supposed opinions:

In the very beginning, then, of his educational career, Froebel emphasized rather than overlooked “the relationships amidst which man is set,” but he was to learn more yet about development.

Six years later he is back at a university, and “just at this time,” he says, “those great discoveries of the French and English philosophers became generally known through which the great manifold external world was seen to form a comprehensive outer world.”

The English writer may have been Erasmus Darwin. The French writer was no doubt Lamarck, to whom belongs “the immortal glory of having for the first time worked out the theory of Descent as an independent scientific theory of the first order and as the philosophical foundation of the whole science of Biology.”

From some such source, at any rate, Froebel must have gained “the key-note of development,” viz., that it is always from the undifferentiated to the differentiated. We have already seen that he applied this to mental development and so gained his modern conception of the earliest infant consciousness, “an undifferentiated unorganized unity.”

In “The Education of Man” he speaks of

and in the Mother Songs he says:

Or, again:

Such quotations fully exonerate Froebel from belief in any “pre-formation” theory, whether physical or mental, as indeed Mr. Cooke made abundantly plain.

It is in one of his later papers[56] that Froebel generalizes and states very plainly how everything is developed under the influence of its environment.

When child development is in question, far from minimising, as he is supposed to do, the importance of environment, parents and teachers are told:

“We must hold fast for consideration in life this fact, that in the spontaneous occupation and playing of the child, not the germ only, but the growing point of his life also, is formed in union with his surroundings, and under their silent unremarked influence (im Vereine mit der Umgebung und unter deren stillen unbemerkten Einwirkung).”—P., p. 108.