to meet the
needs of afterlife, and opposed having the interests of the child
sacrificed to those of the man; for the child in his eyes is sacred, an
independent blessing bestowed upon him by God, towards whom he has the
one duty of restoring to those who confided it to him in a higher degree
of perfection, with unfolded mind and soul, and a body and character
steeled against every peril. "A child," he says, "who knows how to do
right in his own childish sphere, will grow naturally into an upright
manhood."

With regard to instruction, his view, briefly stated, is as follows: The
boy whose special talents are carefully developed, to whom we give the
power of absorbing and reproducing everything which is connected with his
talent, will know how to assimilate, by his own work in the world and
wider educational advantages, everything which will render him a perfect
and thoroughly educated man. With half the amount of preliminary
knowledge in the province of his specialty, the boy or youth dismissed by
us as a harmoniously developed man, to whom we have given the methods
requisite for the acquisition of all desirable branches of knowledge,
will accomplish more than his intellectual twin who has been trained
according to the ideas of the Romans (and, let us add, Hegel).

I think Froebel is right. If his educational principles were the common
property of mankind, we might hope for a realization of Jean Paul's
prediction that the world would end with a child's paradise. We enjoyed a
foretaste of this paradise in Keilhau. But when I survey our modern
gymnasia, I am forced to believe that if they should succeed in equipping
their pupils with still greater numbers of rules for the future, the
happiness of the child would be wholly sacrificed to the interests of the
man, and the life of this world would close with the birth of overwise
greybeards. I might well be tempted to devote still more time to the
educational principles of the man who, from the depths of his full, warm
heart, addressed to parents the appeal, "Come, let us live for our
children," but it would lead me beyond the allotted limits.

Many of Froebel's pedagogical principles undoubtedly appear at first
sight a pallid theorem, partly a matter of course, partly impracticable.
During our stay in Keilhau we never heard of these claims, concerning
which we pupils were the subject of experiment. Far less did we feel that
we were being educated according to any fixed me