The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

other person to make his work known. Meeting, in 1849, the man mentioned to her as “an old fool,” she understood him, and spent the remainder of her life in bringing to the attention of the world the work of this unworldly man who did not know how to make it known for himself. In 1851 the Prussian Government, fearing some revolutionary designs in the new idea, and acting in a manner thoroughly characteristic of the political reaction which by that time had taken hold of all German official life, forbade kindergartens in Prussia. The Baroness then went to London and lectured there on Froebel’s ideas, organizing kindergartens in the English “ragged schools.” Here, by contrast, she met with a cordial reception. She later expounded Froebelian ideas in Paris, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and (after 1860, when the prohibition was removed) in Germany. In 1870 she founded a kindergarten training-college in Dresden. Many of her writings have been translated into English, and published in the United States.

 

Considering the importance of this work, and the time which has since elapsed, the kindergarten idea has made relatively small progress on the continent of Europe. Its spirit does not harmonize with autocratic government. In Germany and the old Austro-Hungary it had made but little progress up to 1914. Its greatest progress in Europe, perhaps, has been in democratic Switzerland. [16] In England and France, the two great leaders in democratic government, the Infant-School development, which came earlier, has prevented any marked growth of the kindergarten. In England, though, the Infant School has recently been entirely transformed by the introduction into it of the kindergarten spirit. [17] In France, infant education has taken a somewhat different direction. [18]

 

In the United States the kindergarten idea has met with a most cordial reception. In no country in the world has the spirit of the kindergarten been so caught and applied to school work, and probably nowhere has the original kindergarten idea been so expanded and improved. [19] The first kindergarten in the United States was a German kindergarten, established at Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1855, by Mrs. Carl Schurz, a pupil of Froebel.

During the next fifteen years some ten other kindergartens were organized in German-speaking communities. The first English-speaking kindergarten was opened privately in Boston, in 1860, by Miss Elizabeth Peabody. In 1868 a private training-college for kindergartners was opened in Boston, largely through Miss Peabody’s influence, by Madame Matilde Kriege and her daughter, who had recently arrived from Germany. In 1872 Miss Marie Boelte opened a similar teacher-training school in New York City, and in 1873 her pupil, Miss Susan Blow, accepted the invitation of Superintendent William T. Harris, of St. Louis, to go there and open the first public-school kindergarten in the United States. [20]

 

To-day the kindergarten is found in some form in nearly all countries in the world, having been carried to all continents by missionaries, educational enthusiasts, and interested governments. [21] Japan early adopted the idea, and China is now beginning to do so.

 

THE KINDERGARTEN IDEA. The dominant idea in the kindergarten is natural but directed self-activity, focused upon educational, social, and moral ends. Froebel believed in the continuity of a child’s life from infancy onward, and that self-activity, determined by the child’s interests and desires and intelligently directed, was essential to the unfolding of the child’s inborn capacities. He saw, more clearly than any one before him had done, the unutilized wealth of the child’s world; that the child’s chief characteristic is self-activity; the desirability of the child finding himself through play; and that the work of the school during these early years was to supplement the family by drawing out the child and awakening the ideal side of his nature. To these ends doing, self activity, and expression became fundamental to the kindergarten, and movement, gesture, directed play, song, color, the story, and human activities a part of kindergarten technique. Nature study and school gardening were given a prominent place, and motor-activity much called into play. Advancing far beyond Pestalozzi’s principle of sense-impressions, Froebel insisted on motor-activity and learning by doing (R.

358).

 

Froebel, as well as Herbart, also saw the social importance of education, and that man must realize himself not independently amid nature, as Rousseau had said, but as a social animal in co�peration with his fellowmen. Hence he made his schoolroom a miniature of society, a place where courtesy and helpfulness and social co�peration were prominent features. This social and at times reverent atmosphere of the kindergarten has always been a marked characteristic of its work. To bring out social ideas many dramatic games, such as shoemaker, carpenter, smith, and farmer, were devised and set to music. The “story” by the teacher was made prominent, and this was retold in language, acted, sung, and often worked out constructively in clay, blocks, or paper. Other games to develop skill were worked out, and use was made of sand, clay, paper, cardboard, and color. The “gifts” and “occupations” which Froebel devised were intended to develop constructive and aesthetic power, and to provide for connection and development they were arranged into an organized series of playthings.

Individual development as its aim, motor-expression as its method, and social co�peration as its means were the characteristic ideas of this new school for little children (R. 358).

 

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE KINDERGARTEN. Wholly aside from the specific training given children during the year, year and a half, or two years they spend in this type of school, the addition of the kindergarten to elementary-school work has been a force of very large significance and usefulness. The idea that the child is primarily an active and not a learning animal has been given new emphasis, and that education comes chiefly by doing has been given new force. The idea that a child’s chief business is play has been a new conception of large educational value. The elimination of book education and harsh discipline in the kindergarten has been an idea that has slowly but gradually been extended upward into the lower grades of the elementary school.

 

To-day, largely as a result of the spreading of the kindergarten spirit, the world is coming to recognize play and games at something like their real social, moral, and educational values, wholly aside from their benefits as concern physical welfare, and in many places directed play is being scheduled as a regular subject in school programs. Music, too, has attained new emphasis since the coming of the kindergarten, and methods of teaching music more in harmony with kindergarten ideas have been introduced into the schools.

 

INSTRUCTION IN THE MANUAL ACTIVITIES. Froebel not only introduced constructive work—paper-folding, weaving, needlework, and work with sand and clay and color—into the kindergarten, but he also proposed to extend and develop such work for the upper years of schooling in a school for hand training which he outlined, but did not establish. His proposed plan included the elements of the so-called manual-training idea, developed later, and he justified such instruction on the same educational grounds that we advance to-day. It was not to teach a boy a trade, as Rousseau had advocated, or to train children in sense-perception, as Pestalozzi had employed all his manual activities, but as a form of educational expression, and for the purpose of developing creative power within the child. The idea was advocated by a number of thinkers, about 1850 to 1860, but the movement took its rise in Finland, Sweden, and Russia.

 

The first country to organize such work as a part of its school instruction was Finland, where, as early as 1858, Uno Cygnaeus (1810-1888) outlined a course for manual training involving bench and metal work, wood-carving, and basket-weaving. In 1866 Finland made some form of manual work compulsory for boys in all its rural schools, and in its training-colleges for male teachers. In 1872 the government of Sweden decided to introduce sloyd work into its schools, partly to counteract the bad physical and moral effects of city congestion, and partly to revivify the declining home industries of the people. A sloyd school was established at Naas, in 1872, to train teachers, and in 1875 a second school, known as a “Sloyd Seminarium,” was begun. The summer courses of these two schools were soon training teachers from many nations. In 1877 sloyd work was added to the Folk School instruction of Sweden. At first the old native sloyd occupations were followed, such as carpentering, turning, wood-carving, brush-making, book-binding, and work in copper and iron, but later the industrial element gave way to a well-organized course in educational tool work for boys from twelve to fifteen years of age, after the Finnish plan.

 

SPREAD OF THE MANUAL-TRAINING IDEA. France was the first of the larger European nations to adopt this new addition to elementary-school instruction, a training-school being organized at Paris in 1873, and, in 1882, the instruction in manual activities was ordered introduced into all the primary schools of France. It has required time, though, to provide work rooms and to realize this idea, and it is still lacking in complete accomplishment. In England the work was first introduced in London, about 1887. The government at once accepted the idea, encouraged its spread, and began to aid in the training of teachers. By 1900 the work was found in all the larger cities, and included cooking and sewing for girls, as well as manual work for boys. The training for girls goes back still farther, and was an outgrowth of the earlier “schools of industry” established to train girls for domestic service (R. 241). By 1846 instruction in needlework had been begun in earnest in England. In German lands needlework was also an early school subject, while some domestic training for girls had been provided in most of the cities, before 1914. Manual training for boys, though, despite much propaganda work, had made but little headway up to that time. As in the case of the kindergarten, the initiative and self-expression aspects of the manual-training movement made no appeal to those responsible for the work of the people’s schools, and, in consequence, the manual activities have in German lands been reserved largely for the continuation and vocational schools for older pupils.

 

In the United States the manual-training and household-arts ideas have found a very ready welcome. Curious as it may seem, the first introduction to the United States of this new form of instruction came through the exhibit made by the Russian government at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, showing the work in wood and iron made by the pupils at the Imperial Technical Institute at Moscow. This, however, was not the Swedish sloyd, but a type of work especially adapted to secondary-school instruction. In consequence the movement for instruction in the manual activities in the United States, unlike in other nations, began as a highly organized technical type of high-school instruction, [22] while the elementary-school sloyd and the household arts for girls came in later. This type of technical high school has since developed rapidly in this country, has rendered an important educational service, and is a peculiarly American creation. In Europe the manual-training idea has been confined to the elementary school, and no institution exists there which parallels these costly and well-equipped American technical secondary schools.

 

The introduction of manual work into the elementary schools came a little later, and a little more slowly. As early as 1880 the Workingmen’s School, founded by the Ethical Culture Society of New York, had provided a kindergarten and had extended the kindergarten constructive-work idea upward, in the form of simple woodworking, into its elementary school. In the public schools, experimental classes in elementary-school woodworking were tried in one school in Boston, as early as 1882, the expense being borne privately. In 1888 the city took over these classes. In 1886 a teacher was brought to Boston from Sweden to introduce Swedish