Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/121

Rh that we can do better than others. An object of this kind tends to destroy that "harmony of life," that "peacefulness of heart," the attainment of which for himself and others was Froebel's chief object. In our time, when the conflict of life seems to be constantly increasing, this harmony and peacefulness seem to be further off than ever. It is more difficult to introduce harmony into complicated than into simple forms of life. We have had many writers of pretty ballads, but only one Shakespeare. In past generations there were many people who lived harmonious but narrow lives, the men pursuing the same occupations which their fathers pursued before them, and the women chiefly occupied with household concerns, thus quietly passing through a life of calm content without hurry or striving. Many of them worked out in their lives the saying that "to do is better than to know," though perhaps if they had heard it they would hardly have understood it. But this kind of life has become impossible, and the problem now is how to introduce unity into the turmoil of modern life.

Like Froebel, when a problem of the same kind presented itself to him, we turn to a change in education for its solution. Much may be done by training children to value things in their right proportions from the first, and by encouraging them to preserve the simplicity and reality of childhood, instead of exchanging them for the shams and conventions of "grown-up-land." Our faith ought not to be less than that of Froebel. It is true that the conditions are now more complicated, but on the other hand the world is now beginning to awake to the immense importance of right education. We are now taking pains to find out what is really wanted in the lives of the poor, instead of trying to force upon them things which we think they ought to want, so that many lives, which would otherwise be very narrow, are gradually being widened in a wholesome way. It is going out of fashion to offer to people, because they are poor, mental and moral food which the givers would decline if offered to themselves. In short, there is more reality than at any former period in the efforts of the rich to help the poor, and an earnest attack is being made in this direction on the contradictions of life. There are many among the rich who are painfully oppressed by the weight of luxuries, which it appears impossible under present conditions to share with others, and are making earnest endeavors to find out the right kind of mercy which shall really bless him that gives and him that takes. It is found that something can be done by offering opportunities for culture, for innocent enjoyment, for participation in simple pleasures, and, to those who are capable of it, for deeper thought. So that here also we find in wholesome education a lessening of the contradictions of life.