FROEBEL'S GIFTS BY FATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN AND NCRA ARCHIBALD The i rue
teacher is a student of human nature, and the student of human
nature is the pupil of God. HORATIO STEEBINS BOSTON AND NEW YORK
EOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY PEEPACE THE tliree little volumes on tLat
Republic of Childhood, the kindergarten, of which this hand book,
dealing with the gifts, forms the initial number, might well be
called Chips from a Kin dergarten Workshop. They are the outcome of
talks and conferences on Froebels educational principles with
successive groups of earnest young women here, there, and
everywhere, for fifteen years, and represent as much practical work
at the bench as a carpenter could show in a similar length of time.
They are the result of mutual give and take, of question and
answer, of effort and experience, of the friction of minds against
one another, of ideas struck out in the heat of argument, and of
varied experience with many hundred little children of all
nationalities and conditions. They are not theories, written in the
seclusion of the study and if perchance they have the defects, so
should they have the virtues, vi PREFACE too, of work corrected and
revised at every step by the child in the midst. If It is objected
that many things in them have been heard before, we can but say
with Montaigne Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no
more his who spake them first than his who spake them after. The
various talks have been cut down here, enlarged there, condensed in
one place, amplified in another, from year to year, as knowledge
and experience have grown many of the ideas which they advocated in
the beginning have been elimi nated, as being completely reversed
by thepassage of time, and much new matter has been added as the
kindergarten principle has developed. They are as much a growth as
a coral reef, though the authors have little hope that they will be
as enduring. The kindergarten of 1895 is not the kinder garten of
1880, for the science of education has made great strides in these
past fifteen years. Many things which were held to be vital
principles when we began our talks with kindergarten students, we
now find were but lifeless methods after all. It is not that time
has reversed the fundamental principles on which the kindergarten
PBJSFACE vii rests, these are as true as trutli and as change less
but the Interpretation of them has greatly changed and broadened
with the passage of years, and many of the instrumentalities of
education which Froebel devised are destined to further
transformation in the future. For this reason, the last book on the
kindergarten is sometimes the best book, since it naturally
embodies the latest thought and discovery on the subject. These
talks on the kindergarten have purposely been divested of a certain
amount of technicality and detail, in the hope that they will thus
reach not only kindergarten students, but the many mothers and
teachers who really long to know what Froebels system of education
is and what it aims to do. They will never of themselves make a
kindergartner, and are not intended to do so but they certainly
should shed some light on Froebel s theories, and establish a basis
on which they can be worked out in the home and in the school. We
shall attempt no defense of the kindergar ten here. It has passed
the experimental stage It is no longer on trial for its life and no
longer humbly begging, hat in hand, for a place to lay its head. As
an educational idea, it is a recog viii PREFACE nized part of the
great system of child-training and to say, in this year of our
Lord, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five, that one does not
believe in the kindergarten is as if one said, I do not believe in
electricity, or, I never saw much force in the law of
gravitation...
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