We talk a great deal about the strength of early impressions.  I wonder if we mean all we say; we do not live up to it, at all events.  “In childish play deep meaning lies.”  “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”  “Give me the first six years of a child’s life, and I care not who has the rest.”  “The child of six years has learned already far more than a student learns in his entire university course.”  “The first six years are as full of advancement as the six days of creation,” and so on.  If we did believe these things fully, we should begin education with conscious intelligence at the cradle, if not earlier.  The great German dramatic critic, Schlegel, once sneered at the brothers Jacob and William Grimm, for what he styled their “meditation on the insignificant.”  These two brothers, says a wiser student, an historian of German literature, were animated by a “pathetic optimism, and possessed that sober imagination which delights in small things and narrow interests, lingering over them with strong affection.”  They explored villages and hamlets for obscure legends and folk tales, for nursery songs, even; and bringing to bear on such things at once a human affection and a wise scholarship, their meditation on the insignificant became the basis of their scientific greatness and the source of their popularity.  Every child has read some of Grimm’s household tales, “The Frog Prince,” “Hans in Luck,” or the “Two Brothers;” but comparatively few people realize, perhaps, that this collection of stories is the foundation of the modern science of folk-lore, and a by-play in researches of philology and history which place the name of Grimm among the benefactors of our race.  I refer to these brothers because they expressed one of the leading theories of the new education.

“My principle,” said Jacob Grimm, “has been to undervalue nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great.”  When Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten, in the course of his researches began to watch the plays of children and to study their unconscious actions, his “meditation on the insignificant” became the basis of scientific greatness, and of an influence still in its infancy, but destined, perhaps, to revolutionize the whole educational method of society.

It was while he was looking on with delight at the plays of little children, their happy, busy plans and make-believes, their intense interest in outward nature, and in putting things together or taking them apart, that Froebel said to himself:  “What if we could give the child that which is called education through his voluntary activities, and have him always as eager as he is at play?”