--JOSEPH
PAYNE, _Lectures on the Science and Art of Education_, Syracuse, 1885,
p. 254.
Years afterwards, the celebrated Jahn (the "Father Jahn" of the German
gymnastics) told a Berlin student of a queer fellow he had met, who
made all sorts of wonderful things from stones and cobwebs. This queer
fellow was Froebel; and the habit of making out general truths from the
observation of nature, especially from plants and trees, dated from the
solitary rambles in the Forest.
As the cultivator creates nothing in the trees and plants, so the
educator creates nothing in the children,--he merely superintends the
development of inborn faculties. So far Froebel agrees with Pestalozzi;
but in one respect he was beyond him, and has thus become, according
to Michelet, the greatest of educational reformers. Pestalozzi said
that the faculties were developed by exercise. Froebel added that
the function of education was to develop the faculties by arousing
_voluntary activity_. Action proceeding from inner impulse
(_Selbsthaeligkeit_) was the one thing needful, and here Froebel as
usual refers to God: "God's every thought is a work, a deed." As
God is the Creator, so must man be a creator also.
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