Education in The Home, The Kindergarten, and The Primary School Part 11

"Why, I should tell him he was a very naughty boy, meddling with other people's things, and that he had done something that he could never make up, for there was no more of that hair."

"Well," said I, "and I suppose you would say that, very likely crying, and if he seeing that he had given you such pain, should begin to cry, and should cry all the rest of the day, and cry himself to sleep, and when he waked in the morning should begin to cry again, and should cry all day for weeks--what would you do?"

"Why, I should tell him I was sorry to lose my locket, but I could bear it, and he must forget about it, for he did not know what a mischief he was doing, and I should take him out to walk, and amuse him, and do everything to make him forget it."

"Why should you do all this?"

"Because I love him," she said.

"Do you believe you love him better than G.o.d loves you?"

With a look of surprise, she said, "Does G.o.d love us the same way we love?"

"There is but one kind of love," I said, "and I really think He would like to have you forget that _lie_ you told so long ago, without thinking how wrong it was, because you were thinking of something else, just as Edward was only thinking he wanted to see what was under the gla.s.s of the locket."

She looked at me wistfully.

"Did you ever read about Jesus Christ in the New Testament?" said I.

"Yes, and I hate to."

"Why?"

"Because you know everybody says we must be like Him, and He never did anything wrong, and I cannot be like Him, for I do wrong of all kinds--beside that _lie_, and you know how cross I am."

"O," said I, "I do not wonder you feel discouraged if you think that you must be as good as Jesus Christ right away, to begin with; but Jesus Christ came into the world to say a word that is the most important word in the New Testament, and if He had not said it, He would have done us more harm than good with His perfect example, discouraging us entirely."

"What was that word?" she asked, with the most eager interest.

"_Pardon_," said I, "for all past wrong-doing that you are sorry for."

"Oh, Miss Peabody, I never thought of the meaning of that word before."

"Yes, darling," said I, "and that is the reason of all your trouble. Now think of it always; and thank G.o.d that He sent Jesus to say it. That _lie_ of yours G.o.d has pardoned long ago, just as you would have pardoned little Edward. We all do wrong things when we are children, and learn by doing them not to do them again. Now from to-day begin all your life over again. When you miss in your lessons, instead of crying, just let it go, and ask me to help you try again. So in making other mistakes, and when you feel cross, which comes in your case because you are so easily discouraged,--for that makes you have dyspepsia,--just forget it as soon as possible and go and do something pleasant, and think that G.o.d loves you, and only lets you do wrong to show you that you need to be getting wisdom all the time, and you will grow stronger continually, and the older you grow, the better you will understand."

I never knew a moral crisis in any child's life so marked as this was.

She had a very hard path in life to walk and suffered much, but she never again lost the hope by which we live, and at length, full of years, joined "the Choir Invisible," from which commanding standpoint she doubtless sees the end from the beginning, and how G.o.d's redeeming Providence completes His creation of a free agent. What I insist upon is, that a child should never be left to doubt, but should always be helped to feel _sure_ that G.o.d is loving him better than he loves himself; is sorry far more than angry with him when he has done wrong, and therefore it is that He will not let him succeed in doing wrong, but has so arranged things that the wrong always gets checked; that G.o.d is especially good precisely because He "makes the ways of the transgressor hard." Never let the Infinite Power appear to the naughty child's imagination as punis.h.i.+ng, but only as encouraging, inspiring, helping!

It is recorded as characteristic of the highest manifestation of G.o.d and Educator of man, who appeared to His most spiritual disciple as the "Eternal Word made flesh," that He did not "quench the smoking flax or bruise the broken reed," but distilled upon humanity--especially in its flowering stage--the gentle dews of blessing,--taking little children in His arms to bless them.

You may ask, But what if a child proves in some instances incorrigible to the method of love? What shall we do then? I think it will be sufficient to ask any _Christian_, What did Jesus do when the Jews proved insensible and incorrigible to his long-suffering, brotherly love, making it the occasion of their own capital crime? Did he abandon the method of love when they nailed him to the cross, or even doubt it?

Let us dwell on this a little. Was it not the special trial of Jesus Christ's human life, the last temptation through which he was constrained by his apparent failure of accomplis.h.i.+ng the work of redeeming Israel, by leading them of their own selves to judge and do what is right to cry out, My G.o.d! my G.o.d! why hast thou forsaken me? For instead of their _coming to him_ to get the waters of life he offered, they had made it the very act of their _religion_ to murder him as a blasphemer. I ask, Did he, even then, exchange his method of _forbearing love for cursing_? Did he not, _even then_, hold fast to the principle of brotherliness by commending his spirit (which was his work) into the hands of the Father, with the words: "Forgive them, for _they know not what they do_"; showing that he felt that this ignorance was infinitely more pitiable than his own apparently forgotten bodily agonies? And, in this great _humane_ act of forbearance, and _divine_ act of faith did he not reveal in its fulness the loving character of G.o.d, whom he had always called _Father_, and with whom he proved himself _one_ by this very token, which converted the Jewish thief and the Roman centurion on the spot; and which, step by step, is slowly but surely (by inspiring his disciples with the same spirit and method of dealing with their fellow-beings) _converting the world_? The moment of despair of an immediate spiritual good we are trying to do, is often the moment of our doing a higher and greater good.

As Jesus resigned his own finite will, as the son of David, which was fixed on bringing the Jewish nation to fulfil its national mission of "_blessing_ all the families of the earth," which he understood to be the motive inspiration of Abraham's emigration from Babylonian civilization into the wilderness; and as he accepted the will of his Father, which seemed to be that the privilege to do this patriotic duty was not granted to him as he had grown up thinking, _the will was lifted_, and he found himself doing _more_--becoming the Saviour, not of the _nation_ of the Jews merely, _but of all men_, and so sat down on the right hand of G.o.d. For he proved himself to the _heart of all humanity_, G.o.d's Son, _loving_, not for the sake of men's _reciprocation_ and appreciation of himself, but for the sake of _the salvation_ of humanity. Therefore Christ's method is the one for every man and woman on all planes of activity, however humble. I have heard more than one mother say, that when they had tried every method they knew of to influence their child to give up some wrong object on which the irrefragable free will was bent, and all tender and violent measures had failed, the _irrepressible_ tears of their despairing love had most unexpectedly melted the hardness of self-will at _once_, and _effected the cure_. LOVE, _when it is understood_, is _irresistible_. Our sacred oracles teach us that the origin of evil is in a doubt of G.o.d's love. In Eden it was a suspicion that He had some selfish ends in forbidding even one thing in a world of free gifts.

The conquest of evil, on the other hand, they represent, was in Jesus Christ's trusting _G.o.d's love_, in a lost world, amidst the physical agonies of his cross, and the moral anguish of a disappointment of the grandest aim that ever one born of woman had set to himself for his life-work. In faithfully trying to do the lesser good just at hand, he developed the power to _save all men from their sins; not merely his own people_.

To the training cla.s.s of kindergartners I would say, _your_ special work is rather to _prevent_, than to conquer sin, in the objects of your care; therefore you should, in your own imagination, a.s.sociate yourself with _G.o.d creating_, first leading children to realize that all He has made is _very good_ and must be kept so, which is giving the religious nurture.

That great word of Frbel, _man is a creative_ being, has said in the world of education, whether religious, moral, or intellectual, "Let there be light," and is never to be forgotten in its uttermost meaning.

In this truth you will find an infinite resource of hope and successful energy. You may think that you apprehend and accept the scope of this pregnant word, because you do not reject it as a proposition; but partial knowledge is often deluding, and _not doubting_ is far from _efficient conviction_, which a comprehensive and penetrating understanding of a principle gives. Let me ill.u.s.trate this illusion of thinking we comprehend when we do not, by some of Frbel's gifts.

Think of the four last gifts of Frbel in their wholeness of form, _as cubes_. When these cubes are uncovered and you recognize them as eight, or twenty-seven, or thirty-six wooden, solid, six-sided, eight-cornered, twelve-edged units, and see the relations of their properties in nature, it may seem to you as if you exhaustively knew the cube; but you do not if you have omitted to notice one property inherent in it, more important because pregnant with more consequences than any other property,--I mean its _divisibility_ by means of which its possible transformations are innumerable, every transformation presenting the symmetry of the original in a new variety of beauty, so that if you will give to a child one of these divisible cubes and suggest to him the clue of the law of connecting contrasts, which is the law of all production, he will never tire (except physically) of making the new combinations, and seeking through each and all, that sense of a _whole_ which was the first impression. It is by reason of its divisibility, that the cube can be transformed infinitely. Now you may conceive the nature of man as a whole, and observe a great many of his attributes, and yet not see the greatest,--_his creativeness_, whose consequences are infinite.

Educational science has, in fact, generally omitted to do this in the past, and treated a child according to the attributes it recognized; but, because before Frbel's day man had not been recognized by the reflective mind as a creative being, it had not been realized that he can be transformed, or transform himself as well as his surroundings, infinitely, ever producing something _new_, and hence that there may be, in the lapse of ages, as much variety in human production as there is in G.o.d's workings in the Universe.

It is, in short, because education has not hitherto conceived of man as _creative_, that there has been so much dead uniformity and lifeless repet.i.tion on the plane of humanity; and that a general characteristic of educational systems. .h.i.therto has been a mechanical running of the human being into certain fixed moulds, not only irrespective of individual tendencies, but antagonistic to the universal creative impulse, which is the profoundest characteristic of man, and which, not being understood, has, in a great measure, proved only a source of disorder, and given a bad name with people of genius to educational art (although it is the highest of all the high arts), its material, if you will forgive the verbal ambiguity, being living spirit.

Richard Wagner has said that "were it not for education, all men would be geniuses, for they are endowed at birth with the pa.s.sionate pursuit of the new, needing only liberty and opportunity for self-direction."

_Liberty and opportunity!_ There could not be a better description of Frbel's principle and method of education.

To give liberty and opportunity to the creative principle of the child is just the work you have to do; but observe, this is not to leave him to the caprices of an uneducated will. There is neither _liberty_ nor _opportunity in that_!

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," _moral_ as well as political; and before the child is old enough to appreciate this, and _be vigilant for himself_, the educator must do so _for him_, genially, but firmly intervening to secure to his mind that _pause before action_ on the moral, the artistic, and intellectual plane, that the Friends recognize to be necessary before acting on the spiritual plane.

The ways of caprice are mult.i.tudinous,--the way of life is _one_ for each individual, and is pointed out to the _pausing_ attentive mind by the Father, who speaks to us, within, forever; but whose voice can only be heard when listened to by _intention_; even on the intellectual plane, we do not let the will go storming on, without the guidance of law, which is the voice of the very present Creator heard in the silence of _reflection_ on perceived facts and truths.

There is a right and a wrong way of doing everything,--_always_. The right way will always produce a thing of use or of beauty, whose reaction on the mind of the producer _cultivates_ his mind, or _grows the human understanding_; but this right way is only to be discovered in that pause between impulse and action which is the characteristic discrimination of man from all other animals, and must be _secured for the child_ by the care of his educators--even when he is only playing, or the play will tire instead of exhilarate.

Hence it is not _enough_, though it is indispensable, to guide children's activity while it is still irreflective to spontaneously make forms of beauty and use with its playthings and materials of occupation; but after they have made something, you are to make them stop and look back (not every time, but often), and _go over in thought_, and put into words, what they have done, and lead them to observe all the properties and relations of the thing that are obvious to the childish sense; and when you have thus secured an impression of the means by which order is attained, you have given an experimental knowledge of there being a spiritual order; that is, a world of individual laws and a law-giver independent of human will and meant to lift it into the divine. Those of you who are _Friends_ will agree with me that human beings can manifest no _spiritual_ beauty or moral power, except so far as they listen to the Shepherd of souls in the holy pause of the hours of wors.h.i.+p, a voice always suggesting loving activity. And cannot you see, that no artistic production, no intellectual work, is possible without listening, in the pause of reflection for the word of the law of beauty or use, that the Creator of the intellect gives? and which makes art and science the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d _with the mind_?

The most important, the crowning work of the kindergartner, is to secure to the child this moment of reflection in the midst of his play and work on all planes of life; and you do so by sympathetically playing with him and gently guiding his unthinking, impulsive activity, and asking him what he has done and is _going to do_, and not letting him do anything till he seeks to do the symmetrical or, at least, the useful thing. It is not every movement that will produce the satisfactory result. It is thus that the child learns that there is a greater mind than his own, or even than his teacher's mind, present with him guiding the intellect, for artistic principles flow into the mind from an Eternal source, _no less_ than do moral and spiritual principles. In short, the true method of the intellect is the perpetual _gift_ of a very present G.o.d, as much as the true method of the heart and soul.

Man, then, in the last a.n.a.lysis, is a creative being; and the Frbel education has for its final object, to give him the dominion over everything in the earth; put all the cosmic forces into his hands,--as well as to bring him into the communion of love with his fellows; thus lifting his whole nature to the height of sitting down with our Elder brother on the throne, with the Universal Father.

You should keep this great idea before you, and it will enable you to _use the technique_ that you have been learning, with a certain freedom as well as fidelity, guiding these playful exercises in such an order as you may find agreeable and salutary for them; and to check caprice, you must insist that, in these appointed times, they do the appointed things, OR DO NOTHING, for they will generally conclude to do the thing in hand, rather than DO NOTHING while all their companions are doing their work; and when they are doing nothing, they will have time for reflection, and to hear the inward voice of law, with the opportunity voluntarily to accept it. Thus does G.o.d give to all his children "to have life in themselves," and to bring out their whole likeness to Himself, which proves that they are not his bond slaves,--like the lower animals,--but SONS. If there are not in the universe two leaves that are alike, still less are there two souls that are alike. But leaves and souls, after all, are alike in more than they are different. You can provide action for all the instincts that children have in common, and create a common consciousness to a certain extent, which is the _common sense_; but what is peculiar to each, and makes the independent individual, is his _own secret_, and you can only help THAT to flower and fruitage by giving him the conditions of free, _independent action_, opening the inward eye and sharpening the inward ear for communication with Him who alone can adequately guide the will to the satisfaction of all the sensibilities of the heart, and the powers of intellect, and all the creative energies: but the religious and moral principles I shall endeavor to _define_ are _general_, not peculiar to, but inclusive of, the kindergarten plan of education. To have these principles clear and disengaged from the accidental a.s.sociations of the various denominations of the church, all of which (and also with many of those outside of any visible church) _unite in that faith in G.o.d_, and that _disinterested love of humanity_, which was historically enacted on earth by Jesus Christ, and _into_ which every child born on the earth should be brought before he is old enough to appreciate those _intellectual_ distinctions which make different _creeds_; because then the kindergartner will be able to meet children on the high plane of life where their _angels_ (does not that mean their spiritual instincts or ideals?) behold the face of the Father, and only then will the kindergartner practically enter into Frbel's method of _living with the children_, and communing with their innocence.

I see a great deal of this practical application in the kindergartens kept by the well-trained kindergartners; and especially when they are _mothers_, who unquestionably make the best kindergartners (other things being equal), because it is easier for mothers to _divine_ the consciousness of their children. In the opening hour of the kindergarten, when the kindergartner interchanges the songs and hymns which the children choose, or at least agree to, with real free conversation, in which each child has a chance to tell what is uppermost in his little mind, the very most important work of the kindergartner is done. It has been my privilege to listen to much of this in the kindergartens kept severally by the mothers, who make the children feel that they are interested in whatever they say, however apparently trivial is the subject, and who answer genially, connecting it with something else, and so organizing the reflective powers of the children, that everything they think is seen to be a part of the process of moral, religious, and even intellectual growth.

The possibility of doing this will prove to any one who has any heart and imagination that it is no mere poetic phrase, but a profound spiritual truth, that "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," that children do "come from G.o.d who is their home, trailing clouds of glory,"

and for a time

"are still attended By the vision splendid,"

although too often

"The man beholds it die away, And fade into the light of common day."

Of course _all_ the opening conversation need not be on the moral and religious planes, but some of it should lead into explanations of nature and of the common life of this work-day world, improving dexterity and common sense; but one can hardly talk with children about anything, in a genuine way, that does not bring out of them some religious or moral expression. I think it is in connection with these conversations to which the children furnish by their spontaneous confidences the vital points, round which the thoughts of the whole little company shall revolve, that the teacher can connect her own story-telling.

For such genuine conversation the necessary prerequisite on the part of the teacher is a real faith in children's being the _breath of G.o.d_ in their Essence.

Then she will not have any _will-work_ of her own, but listen to hear what the child is attending to, be it nothing but a bit of string, which, of course, must have a certain length that can be measured, and with which other things may be measured, and which is made of material that has pa.s.sed perhaps through the hands of many manufacturers, and which in its elements at least was a growth of nature, all whose works bear witness to the being of G.o.d; for G.o.d's throne may be reached from the ground of childish play as certainly and readily as from many a pulpit and cathedral, if not more so.

A child whose affection for his companions and for the personages of a story told by the kindergartner, and who sees the connection of some little playful or other experience that he tells as his story for the morning, is _engaged in a service of G.o.d_, more vitally bearing on his growth in grace than any mere repet.i.tion of prayers. A play bringing out little kindnesses, sweet courtesies, gentle self-adjustments to his companions, the asking and giving of forgiveness for little discourtesies or grave wrong-doings, brings the child nearer G.o.d than any spoken words of wors.h.i.+p can, the joy attending such innocent sweetness being the proof of the vital union of his soul with a very present G.o.d.

So the work of the good Samaritan, though he was doubtless _thinking_ only of the _individual_ he was comforting, and not at all of G.o.d, was recognized by Christ as a _real act of wors.h.i.+p_; for it was the fulfilment of the second commandment _like unto the first_.