Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel

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Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (1782-1852) wasa German educator and psychologist who was a pioneer of the kindergarten system and influenced the growth of the manual training movement in education.

Friedrich Froebel was born on April 21, 1782, in Oberweissbach, a small village in Thuringia. His father was a Lutheran minister. His mother died 9 months after his birth. In 1797 Froebel was apprenticed to a forester in Thuringia. Two years later, while visiting his brother, Froebel took some courses at the University of Jena.

In 1801 Froebel returned home to be with his ailing father. After his father's death the following year he became a clerk in the forestry department of the state of Bamburg. From 1804 to 1805 he served as a private secretary to several noblemen.

Teaching Career

The year 1805 marked a turning point in Froebel's life. He went to Frankfurt intending to become an architect but instead ended up teaching in a preparatory school. The effect of this teaching experience on Froebel was such that he decided to make education his life's work. In 1808 he went to Yverdon, Switzerland, where he tutored boys attending Johann Pestalozzi's institute. Feeling somewhat lacking in his own educational background, he left Yverdon in 1811 and studied at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin until 1816. During this period he briefly served in the army raised by the German states to oppose Napoleon.

In 1816 Froebel opened the Universal German Educational Institute at Keilham, a school based on his own educational theories. Its curriculum was comprehensive in nature, covering all aspects of the student's growth and development - both physical and mental. In 1818 he married Henrietta Hoffmeister.

In Froebel's major educational work, The Education of Man (1826), he explained the basic philosophy which guided his educational undertakings - the unity of all things in God. This doctrine is evident in his work in the area of early-childhood education, to which he turned his attention in 1836. This culminated in the development of his famous kindergarten in 1840. That same year Froebel began to instruct teachers in the principles and methods of the kindergarten. His Mutterund Koselieder (1843) is a song and picture book for children. He spent the remainder of his life elaborating, propagandizing, and defending the principles and practices embodied in the kindergarten.

In 1849, after spending approximately 5 years touring Germany and spreading the idea of the kindergarten, Froebel settled in Liebenstein. He spent the remainder of his life combating conservative forces critical of his educational theories. These forces managed in 1851 to get the Prussian government to ban the kindergarten on the grounds that it was an atheistic and socialistic threat to the state. This action was based not so much on what Froebel had done but rather on his followers' misrepresentation of his educational ideas. He did what he could to restore confidence in his kindergarten but died on June 21, 1852, some 8 years before the ban was lifted by the Prussian government.

The Kindergarten

This preschool experience for children grew out of Froebel's belief that man is essentially part of the total universe that is God. He felt that the only way for one to become one's real self, as God intended, was through the natural unfolding of the innate qualities that made up the whole person. This process should begin as soon as possible and under as natural conditions as possible. The program encouraged free activity, so that forces within the child could be released; creativeness, since man, being part of the creative God, should also create; social participation, since man must by nature act in society (a departure from Rousseau); and motor expression, which is related to activity and learning by doing.

Analysis of Educational Theories

The favorable aspects of his view of the kindergarten lie in Froebel's emphasis on the child, the view that education is growth, the recognition of the importance of activity in education, and the position that knowledge is not the end of education. Less favorable in terms of modern thought is the heavy emphasis he placed on object teaching. Froebel believed in an almost mystical way that an object could in some way create symbolic meaning for a child (for example, association with a ball teaches the meaning of unity). In later years the use of objects was to become a formalized and fixed part of the kindergarten curriculum. The "unfolding of innate qualities" in a mystical manner has also been criticized as being unscientific.

Further Reading

For an account of Froebel see his Autobiography (trans. 1886).For insight into the early growth of the kindergarten in the United States see Nina C. Vandewalker, The Kindergarten in American Education (1908). William Boyd, The History of Western Education (1921; 8th ed. 1966), and James Mulhern, A History of Secondary Education in Pennsylvania (1933), both place the kindergarten in relation to other educational developments.

Fröbel, Friedrich (Oberweißbach, Thuringia, 1782-1852, Marienthal, Thuringia), worked for two years (1808-10) with Pestalozzi at his educational institute at Yverdon, Switzerland, and arrived through his study of Romantic attitudes (see Romantik) at new ideas in child education, which he put into practice after participating in the Wars of Liberation, founding his first pedagogical institute in Keilhau nr. Rudolstadt in 1817 Fröbel adapted the idea of the workings of a creative spirit in Nature to human development from the early stages of infancy. In 1837 he realized his aim to devote himself entirely to children of pre-school age, founding his Anstalt zur Pflege des schaffenden Tätigkeitstriebes in Blankenburg. His practical work was based on the methodical use of toys (Gaben), which he grouped and applied in stages in accordance with his assessment of a child's latent creativity. His six basic groups, starting with the soft ball, follow mathematical principles by the introduction of cubes, which, as building bricks, etc., stimulate constructive, purposeful, and satisfying activity. The Fröbel Kindergarten, established in modernized form in European countries and the USA, derives from these principles. Fröbel introduced the term Kindergarten in 1840 and undertook the training of teachers. In 1851 J. and B. Ronge founded the first kindergarten in Britain; a few years later Fröbel published with them A Practical Guide to the English Kindergarten (1858, repr. 1994, ed. J. Stern).

Ironically, it was in the same year, 1851, that Fröbel's Kindergärten in Prussia were closed; they were not reopened until after his death. The charge of atheism which led to this is thought to have arisen from a confusion of identity with Julius Fröbel (1805-93), his nephew, who was prosecuted on a political charge during the revolutionary period, being condemned to death (but pardoned) in 1848 in Vienna.

Fröbel published Die Menschenerziehung in 1826 (repr. 1994, ed. J. Stern) and Plan zur Errichtung einer Armenerziehungsanstalt in 1840, followed in 1844 by Mutter und Kose Lieder (repr. 1994, ed. J. Stern) which, with a number of short-lived periodicals, were designed to stimulate parental consciousness of a child's mental and emotional needs, which was a fundamental aspect of his whole approach. Gesammelte pädagogische Schriften (3 vols.), ed. W. Lange, appeared in 1862-74 (reissued 1966).

(1782–1852)

The German educator Friedrich Froebel is significant for developing an Idealist philosophy of early childhood education and establishing the kindergarten, a school for four-and five-year-old children that is found worldwide.

Biography

Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel was the youngest of five sons of Johann Jacob Froebel, a Lutheran pastor at Oberweissbach in the German principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolfstadt. Froebel's mother died when he was nine months old. When Friedrich was four years old, his father remarried. Feeling neglected by his stepmother and father, Froebel experienced a profoundly unhappy childhood. At his father's insistence, he attended the girls' primary school at Oberweissbach. From 1793 to 1798 he lived with his maternal uncle, Herr Hoffman, at Stadt-Ilm, where he attended the local town school. From the years 1798 to 1800 he was as an apprentice to a forester and surveyor in Neuhaus. From 1800 to 1802 Froebel attended the University of Jena.

In 1805 Froebel briefly studied architecture in Frankfurt. His studies provided him with a sense of artistic perspective and symmetry he later transferred to his design of the kindergarten's gifts and occupations. In 1805 Anton Gruener, headmaster of the Pestalozzian Frankfurt Model School, hired Froebel as a teacher. To prepare him as a teacher, Gruener arranged for Froebel, now twenty-four years old, to take a short course with Johann Henrich Pestalozzi at Yverdon. Froebel believed Pestalozzi's respect for the dignity of children and creation of a learning environment of emotional security were highly significant educational elements that he wanted to incorporate in his own teaching. He also was intrigued by Pestalozzi's form, number, and name lessons, which would form a basis for his later design of the kindergarten gifts. After his training with Pestalozzi, Froebel taught at Gruner's Model School until he returned to Yverdon in 1808 for two more years of study with Pestalozzi.

From 1810 to 1812 Froebel studied languages and science at the University of Göttingen. He hoped to identify linguistic structures that could be applied to language instruction. He became particularly interested in geology and mineralogy. From 1812 to 1816 Froebel studied mineralogy with Professor Christian Samuel Weiss (1780 - 1856) at the University of Berlin. Froebel believed the process of crystallization, moving from simple to complex, reflected a universal cosmic law that also governed human growth and development.

In 1816 Froebel established the Universal German Educational Institute at Griesheim. He moved the institute to Keilhau in 1817 where it functioned until 1829. In 1818 Froebel married Henrietta Wilhelmine Hoffmeister (1780 - 1839), who assisted him until her death. In 1831 Froebel established an institute at Wartensee on Lake Sempach in Switzerland and then relocated the school to Willisau. Froebel next operated an orphanage and boarding school at Burgdorf.

Froebel returned to Germany, where in 1837 he established a new type of early childhood school, a child's garden, or kindergarten, for three-and four-year-old children. Using play, songs, stories, and activities, the kindergarten was designed as an educational environment in which children, through their own self-activity, could develop in the right direction. The right direction meant that, in their development, children would follow the divinely established laws of human growth through their own activity. Froebel's reputation as an early childhood educator increased and kindergartens were established throughout the German states.

In 1851 Karl von Raumer, the Prussian minister of education, accused Froebel of undermining traditional values by spreading atheism and socialism. Despite Froebel's denial of these accusations, von Raumer banned kindergartens in Prussia. In 1852, in the midst of the controversy, Froebel died. Although kindergartens existed in the other German states, they were not reestablished in Prussia until 1860. By the end of the nineteenth century, kindergartens had been established throughout Europe and North America.

Froebel's Kindergarten Philosophy

Froebel shaped his educational philosophy during the high tide of German philosophical Idealism that was marked by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 - 1803), Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804), and Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770 - 1831). In the Education of Man (1826), Froebel articulated the following idealist themes: (1) all existence originates in and with God; (2) humans possess an inherent spiritual essence that is the vitalizing life force that causes development; (3) all beings and ideas are interconnected parts of a grand, ordered, and systematic universe. Froebel based his work on these principles, asserting that each child at birth has an internal spiritual essence - a life force - that seeks to be externalized through self-activity. Further, child development follows the doctrine of preformation, the unfolding of that which was present latently in the individual. The kindergarten is a special educational environment in which this self-active development occurs. The kindergarten's gifts, occupations, and social and cultural activities, especially play, promote this self-actualization.

Froebel was convinced that the kindergarten's primary focus should be on play - the process by which he believed children expressed their innermost thoughts, needs, and desires. Froebel's emphasis on play contrasted with the traditional view prevalent during the nineteenth century that play, a form of idleness and disorder, was an unworthy element of human life.

For Froebel, play facilitated children's process of cultural recapitulation, imitation of adult vocational activities, and socialization. He believed the human race, in its collective history, had gone through major epochs of cultural development that added to and refined its culture. According to Froebel's theory of cultural recapitulation, each individual human being repeated the general cultural epoch in his or her own development.

By playing, children socialize and imitate adult social and economic activities as they are gradually led into the larger world of group life. The kindergarten provided a milieu that encouraged children to interact with other children under the guidance of a loving teacher.

The Kindergarten Curriculum

Froebel developed a series of gifts and occupations for use in kindergartens. Representing what Froebel identified as fundamental forms, the gifts had both their actual physical appearance and also a hidden symbolic meaning. They were to stimulate the child to bring the fundamental concept that they represented to mental consciousness. Froebel's gifts were the following items.

• Six soft, colored balls
• A wooden sphere, cube, and cylinder
• A large cube divided into eight smaller cubes
• A large cube divided into eight oblong blocks
• A large cube divided into twenty-one whole, six half, and twelve quarter cubes
• A large cube divided into eighteen whole oblongs: three divided lengthwise; three divided breadthwise
• Quadrangular and triangular tablets used for arranging figures
• Sticks for outlining figures· Whole and half wire rings for outlining figures
• Various materials for drawing, perforating, embroidering, paper cutting, weaving or braiding, paper folding, modeling, and interlacing

As a series, the gifts began with the simple undifferentiated sphere or circle and moved to more complex objects. Following the idealist principle of synthesis of opposites, Froebel's cylinders represented the integration of the sphere and the cube. The various cubes and their subdivisions were building blocks that children could use to create geometrical and architectural designs. Using the sticks and rings to trace designs on paper, children exercised the hand's small muscles, coordinated hand and eye movements, and took the first steps toward drawing and later writing.

The occupations were items such as paper, pencils, wood, sand, clay, straw, and sticks for use in constructive activities. Kindergarten activities included games, songs, and stories designed to assist in sensory and physical development and socialization. Froebel published Mutter-und-Kose-lieder, (Mother's songs, games, and stories), a collection of kindergarten songs, in 1843.

Diffusion of the Kindergarten

Kindergartens were established in Europe and North America. In the United Kingdom, Bertha Ronge, a pupil of Froebel's, established several kindergartens. In the United States, German immigrants introduced the kindergarten. In Watertown, Wisconsin, Margarethe Meyer Schurz established a kindergarten for German-speaking children in 1856. In New York, Matilda H. Kriege introduced and marketed kindergarten materials imported from Germany.

Henry Barnard, the first U.S. Commissioner of Education, popularized Froebel's philosophy in his Common School Journal. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804 - 1894) established a kindergarten in Boston, translated several of Froebel's books into English, organized an educational organization called the Froebel Union, and established an institute to train kindergarten teachers.

Superintendent of Schools William Torrey Harris, (1835 - 1909) incorporated the kindergarten into the St. Louis, Missouri, public school system in 1873. Harris was assisted by his associate, Susan Elizabeth Blow (1843 - 1916), a dedicated Froebelian, who wrote Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel in 1899 and Kindergarten Education in 1900.

In the early twenty-first century, kindergarten teachers continue to emphasize Froebel's ideas of developing the social side of a child's nature and a sense of readiness for learning. The important outcome for the kindergarten child is readiness for the intellectual learning that will come later in his educational career.

Bibliography

Downs, Robert B. 1978. Friedrich Froebel. Boston: Twayne.

Froebel, Friedrich. 1889. Autobiography, trans. Emilie Michaelis and H. Keatley Moore. Syracuse, NY: Bardeen.

Froebel, Friedrich. 1896. The Education of Man, trans. W. H. Hailman. New York: Appleton.

Froebel, Friedrich. 1910. Mother's Songs, Games, and Stories, trans. Francis Lord and Emily Lord. London: Rice.

Lawrence, Evelyn, ed. 1969. Froebel and English Education. New York: Schocken.

Lilley, Irene M. 1967. Friedrich Froebel: A Selection from His Writings. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Ross, Elizabeth D. 1976. The Kindergarten Crusade: The Establishment of Preschool Education in the United States. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Vandewalker, Nina C. 1971. The Kindergarten in American Education. New York: Arno Press and New York Times.

Weber, Evelyn. 1969. The Kindergarten: Its Encounter with Educational Thought in America. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

— GERALD L. GUTEK

(1782–1852). Friedrich Froebel was born in Oberweissbuch, Thuringia. His father was a busy pastor, and his mother died soon after his birth, an event he regarded as crucial to his development. His early childhood was unhappy and he was thrown on his own resources, developing the passion for self-contemplation and self-education which he thought essential for all. Though he was moved by the mystical language of his father's hymns and sermons, he was critical of his schooling with its reliance on memorization of facts inculcated by stern teachers. At 15 he was apprenticed to a forester, and he wrote later of his religious communion with Nature at this period: 'I looked within myself and to Nature for help.' He began to develop his personal philosophy: a belief in the organic unity of man, God, and Nature. At the University of Jena he eagerly embraced the idealist philosophy of the time. He believed that all living things had an inherent form and purpose, not predetermined but developing through a kind of creative struggle with the environment. He studied the transcendental biology of the period, and was deeply impressed by the underlying pattern which seemed to unite all living things and by their growth from simple to complex structures. He had a romantic and mystical belief in universal harmony: 'Everything has a purpose, which is to realize its essence, the divine nature developing within it, and so to reveal God in the transitory world.'

Froebel early demonstrated an interest in education and in 1805 began in Frankfurt the work as schoolmaster and private tutor which was to occupy the rest of his life. Like Rousseau he regarded man as essentially good, and his pedagogy starts from perceptive observation of children's behaviour. 'Educators', he wrote, 'must understand their impulse to make things and to be freely and personally active; they must encourage their desire to instruct themselves as they create, observe and experiment.' The teacher was to guide the child in his self-discovery, not direct him. Each stage of development was critical and had to be fully experienced. Play was the young child's 'spontaneous expression of thought and feeling' and was central to learning. For this reason Froebel established the kindergarten, which provided the activities and materials needed by the pre-school child. He invented toys and exercises which became the basis of a pedagogic system whose formalism was curiously at odds with the permissiveness of his philosophy. He laid great emphasis on the relationship between teacher and pupil and on the need for continuity and connectedness in the school curriculum. The child had naturally a sense of the unity of life: it was the business of the school to make him conscious of it. Starting from the child's own experience, the study of religion, nature, mathematics, and language would encourage his awareness of self, the world, and God. The arts would enable him to express his inner life, and physical work teach him the dignity of labour. At all times the school was to maintain close contact with family and community; only so could it remain relevant and vital.

Froebel was a visionary as well as a gifted teacher. He had great ambitions for his educational programme, believing it would unify Germany as well as mankind generally. In fact his influence in his lifetime was limited — a year before his death in 1852, Prussia banned the kindergarten for its 'revolutionary' tendencies. Devoted disciples in Europe and America continued his work, however, and from the 1870s it profoundly influenced the training of teachers and the education of young children. The importance of play, the unified curriculum, links with home and community, and non-directive rather than authoritarian teaching remain live issues. But Froebel's 'organic' theory of human development led him seriously to underestimate social influences in individual lives. When he was asked to plan the education of the poor in Bern, he was at pains to point out that 'there need be no fear that individual pupils will want to improve their position and leave their own class. On the contrary, this system will produce educated men, each true to his calling, each in his own position.'

(Published 1987)

— Norman Stephenson

Bibliography
• Froebel, F. (1825). Menschenerziehung (Eng. trans. 1877, The Education of Man).
• Lilley, I. M. (1967). Friedrich Froebel: A Selection from his Writings.
• Weston, P. (1998). Friedrich Froebel: His Life, Times and Significance.

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