Fröbel, as is known, puts the philosophy of identity at the basis of his pedagogical system, which attracted him with its harmonious and poetic view of nature and man. The unity of object and subject, understood as the unity of being and due, nature and culture, was the basic principle of the philosophy of identity. Froebel also makes it the starting point of his pedagogical system. Culture is a continuation of nature: what what should to do to a person, it is already embedded in his very nature as primordial instincts. The upbringing of a person comes down precisely, according to Frebel, to the development in the child of the instincts inherent in him from birth. Fröbel lists four such basic instincts: labor instinct, knowledge, artistic and religious instinct. A child is active and inquisitive by nature, he naturally feels beauty and strives for God as for his Father. It is the task of the educator to cultivate these instincts, already embedded in the child, by appropriate selection of material for his games and activities. Culture, however, according to Schelling, is not only a continuation of nature, but its disclosure: that which human freedom must still manifest in the acts of its separate, always differentiating creativity — all this has already preexisted in nature from eternity, but in a form not yet revealed, in a vague image of a still undifferentiated unity. The upbringing of a person, according to Froebel, is the transition from an undifferentiated unity to a divided unity of diversity. The instincts embedded in the soul of a child form a vague unity: the desire for work and knowledge, for beauty and God are intertwined with each other, they are not pursued separately, they do not determine a special activity, but they act together at once. Play is an activity in which all instincts appear at once, in a vague unity. At the pinnacle of education, in acts of genuine human creativity, we have a dissected unity of individual aspects of human activity: labor, knowledge, beauty form here a harmonious unity, a synthesis of the directions of the spirit already distinguished in their originality. But in order to rise from the undifferentiated unity to the synthetic unity of the manifold, it is necessary to pass through the intermediate stage of differentiation, or division. So the seed, which covers the future color in a fused form, must first disintegrate, decompose into separate constituent parts. The upbringing of man, being the revelation of his nature, marks this process of dismemberment and differentiation.
“In every knowledge there is truth, in every speck of dust there is organization (integrity),” says Schelling. In the same way, play must be a holistic act of the soul. It must immediately satisfy all the instincts, which only later, in school, will develop each in its own separate way. This determines the selection of material for children’s play. We already know that this material, according to Froebel, must be simple and at the same time conceal the possibility of its own continuous complication corresponding to the growth of the child’s personality. But along with this, it must be multilateral, touching all the strings of the child’s soul at once, concealing the unity of diversity. Fröbel enumerates these individual aspects: these are nature, number and geometric image, word and speech, art, God. Each game should be a study of nature, it should develop the arithmetic and geometric intuition of the child, at the same time it should exercise his speech, reveal to him the beauty in nature and God in the world. Any material for the game, no matter how elementary it may be, must satisfy all these aspects of the human spirit. Fröbel therefore marks the ball as the ideal material for a child’s game because, while playing it, the child learns to comprehend nature (for example, elasticity, inertia), masters the basic geometric shape of the ball, thanks to the unexpected and diverse transformations of the ball into those depicted by him. objects enriches his speech, grasps the beauty of form and play of colors, etc. It is not for nothing that the word ball itself, in German B-ALL, says Fröbel, points to the universe (Bild vom ALL), which is reflected in it as in a kind of microcosm.
All the details of the Froebel system, set out by him in his articles on kindergarten, follow from this principle. If we take the famous six gifts: balls, a sphere, a cylinder, a cube, cubes, bricks, they are all selected so as to immediately satisfy all the instincts of the child. Acquaintance with nature here goes hand in hand with the assimilation of geometric forms, at the same time the artistic taste of the child also develops — and all this is intertwined with the development of speech, thanks to the naming of objects depicted by the building against the background of a song sung by children or a story listened to by everyone. The same principle also determines the material of children’s classes after the age of five, which coincides with the last of the six gifts. Flat geometric shapes, colored paper, weaving, lines embodied in twigs, and a dot in seeds, modeling — each of these activities should cover the whole soul of the child as a whole, satisfy all his instincts and inclinations at once.
Already from the examples cited, it is clear how this requirement for the all-roundness of the game entails a tendency characteristic of the Fröbel system towards symbolism, towards being in the world of the imaginary. reality. The ball, cubes, bricks, twigs and seeds are not inanimate things. No, these are all symbols depicting either the surrounding life of animals and people, or the adventures of fairy-tale heroes. Drawing and modeling are also predominantly in the world of fantasy. Finally, gymnastic games are visual games: the frog and the stork, the caterpillar, the chrysalis imprisoned in the dungeon and released from it in the form of a butterfly — these are the themes of gymnastic games, which are peculiar mysteries in which children are both actors and spectators. And all this against the background of a song resounding tirelessly in the kindergarten, turning into a round dance not only a gymnastic game, but also other activities of children.
Fröbel’s kindergarten differs from the school in that it does not know the division of labor, as we have in the school, which is the organization of work. A kindergartener concentrates in herself all the skills and all the knowledge, she is the eldest in the house, if not a mother, then an aunt, or an older sister. According to Fröbel, who, generally speaking, stood for family education, the kindergarten should not replace the family. Rather, it should serve as a model educational institution for mothers who should carry out Fröbel’s ideas at home. But, on the other hand, the kindergarten is not just an extended family, the school is already present in the kindergarten: it shines through in it in the discipline and organization that general singing and social play require and cultivate. Here there is still no work to be carried out jointly by the whole class, but there are already the beginnings of it in the form of a jointly enacted action. If at school a class is united by a goal that must be translated into reality by joint efforts, then in a kindergarten a crowd of children is united in a way that it jointly experiences or portrays.
In general, one could say that the Froebel kindergarten bears the imprint of a kind of peacemaking. After all, myth is characterized by the fact that it represents a still undivided unity of consciousness. Myth answers the questions that science subsequently took upon itself to resolve: questions about the essence of the world and the forces acting in it. At the same time, he tells about Good and Evil, about the appointment of a person as a moral person, about his proper line of behavior and about his fall. At the same time, the myth also contains a code of legal norms. Finally, the myth speaks of man’s place in the world, of his relation to the Divine, of the ways of worshiping God. And all this is stated not by means of concepts and abstract reasoning, but in the form of images in the artistic frame of the verse, and often not even stated, but jointly depicted in a round dance. That which subsequently, in culture, was differentiated into separate paths of science, morality, law, religion and art, lives in myth in a continuous, undifferentiated unity. The myth contains the future culture that it generates, consistently singling out religion, law, science, art. But this is still the threshold of culture, culture in the image of nature. Like nature, myth is elemental, impersonal: it is not an answer to a consciously posed question, it is not a product of individual creativity. It is conciliar, or collective, it exists, as it were, from eternity, being passed from generation to generation. — Isn’t the spirit of the Froebel kindergarten the spirit of myth? The unity of undivided consciousness, culture in the image of nature, not so much the embodiment of what is due and the transformation of reality, but its symbolic image, a conciliar choral action based not on division labor, and at the confluence in general feeling, — are not all these features of the myth also characteristic features of the Fröbel system? Truly, Fröbel in applied philosophy, which is pedagogy, derived from the philosophy of identity the same consequences that Schelling himself came to at the end of his activity in his “philosophy of mythology”. To us, at least, the ideal nursery gardener, as Fröbel thought of it, appears as a choirage of a children’s choir, the initiator and leader of a game that arises spontaneously, proceeds conciliarly and affects all aspects of the child’s soul. After all, the so often encountered frebel girl, leaning down to the children and intrusively clapping her hands, is only a gu.e.e. distortion of the nursery gardener, this, but the thought of a frebel, a chorage of children’s games. This is precisely what determines her pedagogical training, the circle of knowledge and skills that characterize her: a mathematician and a naturalist, a storyteller of folk tales, she must simultaneously be able to sing and draw, master a variety of needlework, and most importantly, have the gift of play, the ability to reincarnate, that wisdom of life that will allow her to symbolically show complex human relationships and all the diversity of culture to children in images, games and activities accessible to them.
Already from this general characteristic of the Fröbel system, it is clear what its limitations are. In the hands of the epigones, who always cling more to what was said than to the phasumswasm, this limitation was bound to reveal in time that one-sidedness lurking in it, which was revealed by the subsequent practice of Frebelism and already noticed by criticism. Froebel’s system is one-sidedly idealistic, critics say, and this is true, since we are talking about the system, about what Froebel clearly said, which can be repeated as what was left of him when a deep knowledge of life and the child, which distinguished himself Froebel and handed over by him to a few of his direct collaborators, has already become a thing of the past. Fröbel’s abstract idealism manifests itself in his system in two ways. First of all, in isolation from life, in that symbolism, by virtue of which children are exclusively in the world of meanings and imagination. True, near Fröbel we have both a children’s garden and even an exemplary cattle yard, which, according to Fröbel, should teach children how to handle plants and animals and thereby prepare them for future more serious and systematic work in the garden and vegetable garden. But here, too, the followers of Fröbel, fascinated by symbolic representation, are ready to plant a garden bed with beautiful flowers that can provide food for consideration, and populate the animal yard with rabbits, rather than allow children to take care of plants and animals of a more practical and useful value. Especially among representatives of orthodox American Frebelism, this absolutization of the symbol and imagination degenerates into a direct fear of everything new, forcing them, according to the witty remark of Stanley Hall, to prefer the pictorial game of tea drinking with symbolic teapots and cups to real tea drinking, in which the children themselves would really set the table. , brewed tea and drank it. Play, so organized, artificially kept on the plane of simple meaning, is completely detached from future work: the goals that the child sets for himself during play cannot, through gradual complication and the removal from the very process of activity associated with it, become the goals of work. Work ceases to shine through in play as its pedagogical justification, and while playing, the child does not become accustomed to work. Hence such a sharp line between the orthodox Froebel kindergarten and school: the kindergarten ignores the school, does not serve as a preparation for it. Entering school, the child begins his education all over again, the school is not able to use the knowledge and skills acquired by the child in kindergarten. One more step, and the game is ready to completely degenerate into fun, self-sufficient, capable only of entertaining children, but not elevating them above themselves, powerless to lead them to something higher than itself.
Closely connected with this is the second feature of Fröbel’s idealism. Justifying the pedagogical significance of this or that occupation, this or that material of children’s play, Froebel almost completely ignores the peculiarities of the psycho-physiological organization of the child. He is completely alien to the biological understanding of play that modern psychology is developing and according to which the vital significance of play lies in the exercise of those organs and abilities of the child that participate in the future work of an adult. The details of the material of a child’s game are substantiated by him in a purely rational way, through an abstract analysis of this very material, which in its abstractness sometimes degenerates into a comically thoughtful analysis of the word, as we had with the ball, German name which seems to justify its pedagogical merits. What organs and mental abilities of the child and to what extent develop during certain occupations — this question, which can be solved only by observation and experiment, is left aside by Froebel. It is not surprising, therefore, that modern hygiene could reject certain Frebelian activities, such as weaving from colored paper, as harmful to the eyesight of children. It is quite understandable that Fröbel did not know those psychological theories that arose after him, and to a large extent due to the interest in the soul of the child, which he aroused with all his activities. But what in Froebel himself was only one-sidedness, which is the inevitable lot of even the greatest discoveries, turns in his overly orthodox followers into self-satisfied narrow-mindedness, ignoring the data of modern psychology and physiology and giving an extra impetus to the degeneration of the game into fun, a danger that even without That already, as we know, is fraught with the Froebel system.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (January 27, 1775 — August 20, 1854) was a German philosopher. He was close to the Jena romantics. An outstanding representative of idealism in the new philosophy.
Starting from I. G. Fichte, he developed the principles of the objective-idealistic dialectics of nature as a living organism, an unconsciously spiritual creative principle, an ascending system of steps (“potentials”), characterized by polarity, the dynamic unity of opposites.
Stanley Hall Granville (February 1, 1844 – April 24, 1924) was an American psychological pioneer and teacher. His interests are in child development (pedology) and evolutionary theory. Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University. Along with William James, Hall was the only one to become president of the American Psychological Association twice (again in 1924).