Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

“ The little darling stands, perhaps between the knees of his father, whose arms are round about him; the mother opens her loving arms to receive him, and calls him to her embrace; the way is short between, and three steps will be sufficient, but where is the courageous faith to say to this mountain of a body, "be removed to another place?" It is not in himself; he cannot produce it any more than he can take himself up by his own ears. It is in the mother; for it is she, not he, who has the knowledge of the yet unexerted power which is flowing into the child from the Creator. ”

“ I was endeavoring to prepare him to minister to his mother, when I could persuade her to let him know the fact of death, by appreciating and defining that crisis of life as a step onward into the deep consciousness of immortality, which I believed would lift her out of the abyss into which her own consciousness seemed to fall at the utterance of the word, in spite of all the intellectual views of immortality which she had for many years cultivated, but which somehow did not meet her exigency, when she felt herself on the brink of the separation of body and mind. ”

“ Mark me, I say religious nurture, not religious teaching. The religion that integrates human education is not to be taught. It is the primeval consciousness of filial relation to God, who alone can reveal Himself; for human language has no adequate expression of God, founded as it is on the material universe, which is the finite opposite of Creative Being. Every individual child is a momentum of God's creativeness which the human Providence of education must take as its datum. Only childhood symbolizes God as "the sum of all being," realizing itself in joy incommensurable. ”

“ This forming of the understanding, this marrying of finite thought to infinite love, is Frœbel's Education; and cannot be accomplished, unless the kindergartner clearly sees what God has done for the child absolutely, and what for an ineffable purpose,—most gracious to the human race,—He has left to be done by human providence, whether of the mother or kindergartner, or some other fellow-creature.
It makes a heaven-wide difference whether the soul of a child is regarded as a piece of blank paper to be written upon, or as a living power, to be quickened by sympathy, to be educated by truth. ”

“ The object of the lecturer was what the kindergartner's first object should be,—to awaken the self-respect of the eternal soul within us all, making the life of our individuality—our personality—which, in its mysterious depth and independent pre-existence to the finite understanding, is the image of the Divine Personality, whose spoken word is the material universe, but clothed in flesh becomes man. It is no part of the kindergartner's duty to give—she can only awaken—the feelings of harmony, beauty, unity, and conscience. ”

“ But fancy and understanding are creative acts of the human spirit, almost defying analysis. In fancy, the mind acts quite reckless and even defiant of nature's laws and order. In understanding, it observes and uses them subjectively. That children delight in using words to name things in the order of nature, and to express qualities and relations in connection, making an echo-picture within of what they see without, is not so wonderful as the exaltation of delight produced by a story which is, as it were, triumphant over nature's laws, and reckless of its order ”

“ Young—but not too young, happy, healthy, loving parents, have the most vigorous, lively and harmoniously organized children; but in all cases, the impulse of life must be met and cherished by the tender, attractive, inspiring force of motherly love; which with caressing tone and invoking smile, peers into the infant's eyes, and importunately calls forth the new person, who, as her instinctive motherly faith and love assure her, is there; and whom she yearns to make conscious of himself in self-enjoyment. ”

“ And it is ever growing towards perfection in the form of poetry, bearing witness to the creativeness (or genius) of man forevermore. As breath is to the material body, keeping men alive in nature, so language is to the social body, keeping individuals alive in history and literature; and as the material universe is symbolical of God's wisdom, so the echoes of the universe tossed from the lips of men are symbolic images of the wisdom of man. ”

“ It may be said that everybody cannot have, at will, imagination and culture. This is true; but such persons should not undertake to keep a kindergarten. Let them do something else; keep shop, cultivate vegetables, work the sewing machine; even keep those schools for older children, in which books are the main teachers. There are multitudes of things to be done; the greatest variety of functions to be performed in human life. But of all things to do, the cultivation of human beings at that period of life when they are utterly at the mercy of those who teach them, is the most sacred. ”

“ Man and nature are the contrasts which God connects and harmonizes. He presents nature to the mind as immutable law, but before the understanding is formed to apprehend law, He emparadises the child in the love of the mother. In short, the human race embodies love to the soul, before the universe (which embodies law) is yet apprehended. The heart that apprehends love, is older than the mind which apprehends law; and it is because it is so, that man feels free. When man becomes mere law to man, instead of love, he feels he is enslaved.
These are the most practical truths for the kindergartner. ”

“ Your last lecture has unmistakably shown that Frœbel's method, in a religious point of view, surpasses everything that has hitherto been done in education. And this is the main point from which a method of education is to be judged for its aim is to awaken love to God and man—the foundation upon which Christianity rests. Education has hitherto done little to awaken this love of man in the young soul, from which all piety flows. ”

“ All the pleasures of intellect, and also of personal affections of the happiest kind, were pale beside the joy of this child—in his communion with God, who was in all his thoughts, and had taken him from his dreariness and growing peevishness, into that joy of childhood which Ruskin speaks of as so entirely out of proportion to the occasions of its expression, and which still had no painful excitement in it, but was simply a spontaneous outflow, not only quickening his thoughts but informing his affections with generosity and gratitude. ”

“ She does not want it to be opposed by others. She will, as far as possible, further or humor it, as we say. And when she finds it necessary to control it, she will try to do it by awakening the child's affectionateness, and so captivating its fancy as to make it feel it is doing as it likes, though it be something different from what it was impelled to do at first; in short, she inspires him to will the better thing, and so educates the blind instinct of self-assertion into a harmonizing and beneficent power, and preserves the child's dignity and nobleness instead of crushing its personality. ”

“ We must justify their ideal of universal equality, by an equal education, an equal opportunity for development of all our people. "The spirit that makes all things new," as the heart of childhood craves, and its hand is eager to enact, is [23] "every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God," to make alive the human heart. Therefore we leave behind us—more and more—those conventions of the Old World that have made even the great work of educating rank as inferior to that which wields the sword of war. ”

“ 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 God's love. ”

“ You will observe Plato's association of music with the laws that are to regulate play. Music, with the Greeks, had indeed a broader meaning than attaches to the word with us, who confine it to that subtle expression of the sense of law and harmony which is made in the element of sound, and addressed to the imagination through the ear. All knowledge and art inspired by the sacred Nine, they named music. Singing was no more music than dancing, drawing, [3] the harmonizing of colors, plastic art, poetry, and science, which is nothing less than thinking according to the rhythmic laws of nature. ”

“ And again, when, in the passive quiet of your moral nature, so predisposed, in youth, to all things genial, you have looked around on this marvellous, ever-teeming earth, ever teeming alike for mind and body, and have felt upon you the flow, as from ten thousand streams of innocent enjoyment, did you not then almost hear them shout in confluence, and almost see them gushing upwards, as if they would prove their unity in one harmonious fountain? ”

“ And when we think of the body, which we identify with ourselves from the moment that we have taken it up and walked by its instrumentality, as put away alone in the ground, the undying person that the soul is, shudders, and can only be comforted by learning to conceive itself wholly detached from the decay, and housed within the bosom of Him who is the Alpha and Omega of our life; of Him whom we have learnt to know with the spirit and understanding also, by the process of living in human relations. ”

“ Every mother and real nurse knows that when the baby begins to be uneasy and gives a cry of dissatisfaction,—to come near with a smile, to make one's presence felt by a caressing tone, or to take the infant in their arms, will comfort it, bringing back the joyful sense of life—a word which signifies active relation;—and, in its highest sense, spiritual relation. ”

“ To be a kindergartner is the perfect development of womanliness—a working with God at the very fountain of artistic and intellectual power and moral character. It is therefore the highest finish that can be given to a woman's education, to be educated for a kindergartner; and it is from the most advanced classes of high and normal schools, public and private, that the pupils of our training schools should come, and from the most refined circles of private life—remembering that these are not identical with wealthy and fashionable ones, for in the latter we often find the vulgar and coarse. ”

“ And here education begins its offices, by helping man to reply Thou art, which he does by his legitimate art. But no one man can utter the thou art of humanity adequately. It takes all humanity forever and ever to do so; and it does not do so but just so far as the men who compose it are in mutual understanding and communion with each other. Therefore each child must be taken by the hand by those already conscious, and led to realize his own consciousness by learning that of his fellows. ”

“ I may be told that if Frœbel's education is wholly of a genial, coaxing character, it fails of being an image of the Divine Providence, which is an alternation of attractions and antagonisms, speaking now in the music of nature, and now in thunders and lightnings, not only cherishing the heart with love, but stimulating the will with law; and be warned not to enervate the character, by producing an æsthetic luxury of sentiment, by which the personal being shall stagnate in the worst kind of selfishness—the passive kind. ”