It should be continued as it begun, by appealing to the heart and the emotions as the starting-point of the human soul.
There should be sequence, orderly progres sion, and one continuous purpose throughout the entire scheme of education, from kinder garten to university.
Education should be conducted according to nature, and should be a free, spontaneous growth,—a development from within, never a prescription from without.
The training of the child should be con ducted by means of the activities, needs, desires and delights, which are the common heritage of childhood.
The child should be led from the beginning to feel that one life thrills through every mani festation of the universe, and that he is a part of all that is.
The object of education is the development of the human being in the totality of his powers as a child of nature, a child of man, and a child of God.
These principles of Froebel's, many of them the products of his own mind, others the pure gold of educational currency upon which he has but stamped his own image, are so true and so far-reaching that they have already begun to modify all education and are destined to work greater' magic in the future. The great teach er's place in history may be determined, by and-by, more by the wonderful uplift and im petus he gave to the whole educational world, than by the particular system of child-culture in connection with which he is best known to day.
Judged by ordinary worldly standards, his life was an unsuccessful one, full of trials and privations, and empty of reward. His death blow was doubtless struck by the prohibition of kindergartens in Prussia in 1851, an edict which remained nine years in force. His strength had been too sorely tried to resist this final crushing misfortune, and he passed away the following year. His body was borne to the grave through a heavy storm of wind and rain that seemed to symbolize the vicissitudes of his earthly days, while as a forecast of the future the sun shone out at the last moment, and the train of mourners looked back to see the low mound irradiated with glory.
In Thuringia, where the great child-lover was born, the kindergartens, his best memorials, duster thickly now; and on the face of the Jiffs that overhang the bridle-path across the Glockner Mountain may be seen in great letters the single word Froebel, hewn deep into the solid rock. Consult von Marenholtz-Billow,