Every kindergartner should bear in mind these words of Bishop Dunham, that, "The true teacher gives nothing but materials, and opportunities, and impulse;" and along whatever line she works, she should remember that her mothers' meetings should supply the impetus and suggest means of self-improvement.

COMPARISON OF THE EDUCATIONAL THEORIES OF FREBEL AND HERBART.

BY JAMES L. HUGHES, INSPECTOR OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS, TORONTO, CANADA.

When history becomes a study of the past for the sources of life and light, the last part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century will stand out clearly as the brightest period in educational development. The revelations of this productive era were more important than its revolutions. The most magnificent evolutions of the period were educational; not military nor political.

Among the many leaders of this era in the great work of educational reform, Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Froebel are the great central figures. If all other educational literature were destroyed, the principles of these three kingly men would still reveal all the vital forces that are molding the educational systems and methods of to-day both in aims and processes.

These men were all living at the same time, and their spheres of labor were not far apart. Pestalozzi was born thirty years before Herbart and thirty-six years before Froebel, and to him, more than to either of the others, must be given the credit of the educational awakening. He aroused Europe, and Herbart and Fræbel must have been influenced by the favorable educational conditions into which they were born. Fræbel undoubtedly owed more than did Herbart to Pestalozzi, because he was a student and fellow-worker with him.

Many of Pestalozzi's educational principles had been revealed by Comenius and Rousseau; but Pestalozzi rediscovered them and discovered other principles for himself, and his ardent enthusiasm and deep sympathetic love for childhood made educational principles liv ing forces in a new and most impressive way. His schools became most suggestive object lessons, and through them his educational principles obtained a vitality that made them controlling forces which started a much-needed educational revolution.

Herbart and Froebel were both more scientific than Pestalozzi in their methods of dealing with the subject of education. They worked out their systems logically and constructively; he was emotional and instinctive.

In their study of the child as the basis of a sound pedagogical system, Herbart and Froebel were in harmony in accepting the parallelism between the progress of the race and the development of the child. This idea was not original with either of them. Many of the ablest philosophers and theologians have held this view, and Rousseau and Pestalozzi had brought it within the range of educational discussion before the time of Herbart and Froebel. Fræbel made more use than Herbart of this idea of similarity between the culture epochs in the growth of the individual and the race. It aided Herbart to decide what instruction is best suited to the child, the youth, the man, at different stages of his development; to Fræbel it helped to reveal, not only suitable material for instruction but proper processes or occupations by which the child, the youth, and the man should define and increase knowledge and power.

Both Herbart and Froebel studied the child in order to lay down a system of education that would help to ennoble man and enable him to work out his highest destiny. They were fully in accord in regard to the true aim of education. Both made the development of moral character the great purpose of all education, and their study of the child was made to find the surest way to reach this desired end. There was a radical difference, however, in their attitude towards the child. Herbart studied the child to find the best that could be done for it; Fræbel studied it to learn how it could be aided in working out its own best development. Herbart magnified the work of the teacher; Froebel magnified the work of the child. Herbart made instruction and Froebel made self-activity the source and cause of growth in knowledge and character.

This difference of view-point leads to the chief distinction between the work of the two great educators. Herbart discusses the work of the teacher, and shows what should be taught to the child, when it should be taught, and why it should be taught, with occasional suggestions as to how it should be taught. Froebel, on the other hand, considers chiefly the work of the child, and endeavors to lay down a complete system of education by which the child's entire nature may be called into vigorous exercise. Froebel keeps constantly in mind the work of the teacher, and he has clearly defined ideas regarding the order in which knowledge should be presented to the unfolding mind; but the basis of his pedagogical system is growth through selfactivity of the child. He discusses the same problems as Herbart; but he reveals the child's part in the work of education, and tries to

show the teacher how to guide the child in doing its own work without interfering with its spontaneity. Herbart improved the work of his predecessors; Fræbel revolutionized it.

President De Garmo summarizes the work of Herbart under three heads: "(1) The development of a system of psychology capable of immediate bearing on the problems of teaching. (2) The scientific application of this psychology to education. (3) The revelation of the possibility of making all the activities of the schoolroom, including especially instruction, bear directly upon moral character."

Even those who differ from Herbart in regard to the foundation principle of his system of psychology must recognize the wonderful ability with which he expounded it. His analytical power is simply marvelous. He sees all sides of a question clearly, and sometimes explains the details of opposing or qualifying principles so profoundly as to leave one somewhat doubtful as to the course of action recommended. A complete series of educational maxims covering the general fields of discipline, training, and teaching might be made from his writings. Certainly no other writer has given dignity to so many commonplace theories; but, on the other hand, no writer has made a closer analysis of mental operations.

Even those who reject the Herbartian theory of soul growth by the accumulation, enlargement, and modification of ideas will be ready to acknowledge the fairness of the claims made by President De Garmo in his summary of Herbart's work, with a slight explanatory statement. The third claim may be misunderstood to mean too much. The expression, "all the activities of the schoolroom," means infinitely less as applied to Herbart's system than when used in relation to the system of Fræbel. With Herbart it refers chiefly to the work done under the specific direction of the teacher; but in Froebel's case it always refers specially to the self-activity of the pupil. The phrase, "including especially instruction," shows, that, in Herbart's system, it is the teacher's work, "especially the work of instruction that bears directly on moral character." Herbart makes this very explicit throughout all his works, and summarizes his entire pedagogical system in two brief sentences: "Instruction will form the circle of thought and education the character. The last is nothing without the first. Herein is contained the whole sum of my pedagogy."

Starting with the idea that the soul possesses no "germ-like faculties," and that it grows through the increase and enrichment of ideas, he concludes that: "The kernel of our mental being cannot be cultivated with certain results by means of experience and intercourse. Instruction most certainly penetrates deeper into the mind.”

Having laid this foundation, he is naturally led to rely on the doctrine of interest as the central element in his pedagogical system. In terest, desire, action, will, is the order of the sequence of human development in his psychology. The doctrine of interest has been expounded by Herbart in a way that leaves little room for enrichment by his successors. With him interest is no passing fancy, no temporary attraction to things or subjects. It covers the whole ground of knowledge and of sympathy; "knowledge of the manifold, of its law, and of its æsthetic relations; sympathy with humanity, with society, and the relation of both to the highest being." He describes interest as, "The joy of life and the elevation of soul which knows how to part from life." He makes it, in the language of one of his greatest interpreters (Ufer), "the root of volition." He has been se verely criticised for making action lead to will, instead of adopting the commonly accepted idea that will leads to action; but those who dissent most strongly from his views regarding the relationship of will and action may learn quite as much from his pedagogical use of interest as those who are his most ardent admirers. Opponents as well as disciples may have their ideas enlarged and defined by Herbart's discussion of interest, many-sidedness of interest, proportionate many-sidedness, empirical interest, speculative interest, æsthetic interest, sympathetic interest, social interest, religious interest, absorption, and reflection.

Herbart's system made instruction the basis of virtue. Ufer crystallizes Herbart's teaching on this point in the sentence: "When instruction has generated knowledge that incites to volition, and that is controlled by ethical ideas, its task is done."

It is easy to see how essential it was for Herbart to insist on apperception and correlation or concentration of studies. Appercep tion to Herbart meant more than the accumulation of knowledge, or even of new knowledge allied to what was already in the mind. It meant mind awakening, mind activity, mind defining, and mind enlargement; not by accretion, but by assimilation of the new knowledge with the corresponding mind content to form a greater mind content, which should be a unity and not an aggregation of related ideas.

Fræbel's educational system rests broadly on two great laws, the law of unity and the law of self-activity. His fundamental thought was unity-unity in the elements of individual power, physical, intellectual, and spiritual; unity in the exercise of human powers, receptive, reflective, and executive; unity of the race, unity of man with nature, and unity of man with God. This law of unity led Froebel to insist even more strongly than Herbart on the perfect articulation and harmonious correlation of studies. He criticised severely the lack

of unity in the studies of the school he attended when a boy, and endeavored to remedy this defect in a school in which he taught while a student in Berlin. In all his after work he made unity an essential. He made this law of unity the basis of his kindergarten system. Every detail of his system, in the gifts, occupations, games, songs, and stories, is related to this central thought. To those who see behind the material and the occupations, the kindergarten is the objective embodiment of true concentration; and Froebel strongly urged that this same principle of correlation should dominate the arrangement of school programs and the methods of teaching in the schools.

Froebel's view of the human soul was directly opposite to that held by Herbart. Fræbel believed that the child has within him a selfactive soul, an element of divinity, the selfhood or individuality of the child, and that this develops by being put forth in gaining a knowledge of its environment and in performing the duties pertaining to the social relationships. These opinions led him to discover his law of spontaneity, or self-activity, which he made the underlying principle of all his developing and teaching processes in the kindergarten and in the school.

He did not mean by this law of spontaneity that the child has to acquire all knowledge by himself, without the aid of the teacher. He gave instruction its true value. He did mean, however, that no instruction really becomes a content of the child's mind in the highest sense until the child has made a creative use of it in some way. Froebel's lessons always have two parts, the instructive and the creative. The teacher gives new instruction, and immediately the child makes an original use or application or modification of it. In this way, by his law of self-activity, Froebel secures, to the fullest possible extent, active, co-operative interest, and the most productive apperception. The child must be more interested and more definitely attentive when using knowledge than it can possibly be in receiving knowledge. Executive attention must be more developing than receptive attention, even if the pupil acts in carrying out the plans of the teacher; it becomes still more productive when the pupil executes its own plan or carries out its own design.

Apperception, too, is more complete, when the child is self-active than at any other time. The mind content corresponding to the new presentation rises to the surface to receive it with greatest energy in response to an impulse to definite action in producing or accomplishing a creative purpose. In this way the assimilation of new knowledge with that already in the mind becomes most perfect, and the mind content so produced responds with greatest freedom and with most vital intensity to the subsequent presentation of new ideas. The superiority of the active apperception of creative self-activity