The Child under Eight | Page 7

ships, etc., a cooking stove of a very simple nature,
dolls of all kinds, wooden animals, growing plants in boxes, an
aquarium."
Any Froebelian would recognise this as the description of a more or
less ideal Kindergarten or Nursery School, and yet the writer had
probably never read a page that Froebel wrote. On the contrary, she
shows her entire ignorance of the real Kindergarten by calling it "pretty
employments devised by adults and imposed at set times by authority."
The description is taken from a very able address on "Child Nature and
Education" delivered some years ago by Miss Hoskyns Abrahall. It is
quoted here, because, for her conception of right surroundings for
young children, the speaker has gone to the very source from which
Froebel took his ideas--she has gone to what Froebel indeed called "the
only true source, life itself," and she writes from the point of view of
the biologist.
There exists at present, in certain quarters, a belief that the
Kindergarten is old-fashioned, out of date, more especially that it has
no scientific basis. It is partly on this account that the ideas of Dr.
Maria Montessori, who has approached the question of the education of
young children from the point of view of medical science, have been
warmly welcomed by so large a circle. But neither in England nor in

America does that circle include the Froebelians, and this for several
reasons. For one thing, much that the general public has accepted as
new--and in this general public must be included weighty names, men
of science, educational authorities, and others who have never troubled
to inquire into the meaning of the Kindergarten--are already matters of
everyday life to the Froebelian. Among these comes the idea of training
to service for the community, and the provision of suitable furniture,
little chairs and tables, which the children can move about, and low
cupboards for materials, all of which tend to independence and
self-control.
It is a more serious stumbling-block to the Froebelian that Dr.
Montessori, while advocating freedom in words, has really set strict
limits to the natural activities of children by laying so much stress on
her "didactic apparatus," the intention of which is formal training in
sense-discrimination. This material, which is an adaptation and
enlargement of that provided by Séguin for his mentally deficient
children, is certainly open to the reproach of having been "devised by
adults." It is formal, and the child is not permitted to use it for his own
purposes.
Before everything else, however, comes the fact that in no place has Dr.
Montessori shown that she has made any study of play, or that she
attaches special importance to the play activities, or natural activities of
childhood, on which the Kindergarten is founded. This is probably
accounted for in that her first observations were made on deficient
children who are notably wanting in initiative.
Among these "play activities" we should include the child's perpetual
imitation or pretence, a matter which Dr. Montessori entirely fails to
understand, as shown in her more recent book, where she treats of
imagination. Here she maintains that only the children of the
comparatively poor ride upon their fathers' walking-sticks or construct
coaches of chairs, that this "is not a proof of imagination but of an
unsatisfied desire," and that rich children who own ponies and who
drive out in motor-cars "would be astonished to see the delight of
children who imagine themselves to be drawn along by stationary

armchairs." Imitative play has, of course, nothing to do with poverty or
riches, but is, as Froebel said long since, the outcome of an initiative
impulse, sadly wanting in deficient children, an impulse which prompts
the child of all lands, of all time and of all classes to imitate or
dramatise, and so to gain some understanding of everything and of
every person he sees around.
The work of Dr. Montessori has helped enormously in the movement,
begun long since, for greater freedom in our Infant Schools; freedom,
not from judicious guidance and authority, but from rigid time-tables
and formal lessons, and from arbitrary restrictions, as well as freedom
for the individual as apart from the class. The best Kindergartens and
Infant Schools had already discarded time-tables, and Kindergarten
classes have always been small enough to give the individual a fair
chance. Froebel himself constantly urged that the child should become
familiar with "both the strongly opposed elements of his life, the
individual determining and directing side, and the general ordered and
subordinated side." He urged the early development of the social
consciousness as well as insisting on expansion of individuality, but it
is always difficult to combine the two, and most Kindergarten teachers
will benefit by learning from Dr. Montessori to apply the method of
individual learning to