Friedrich Froebel

German educator

• Born: April 21, 1782
• Birthplace: Oberweissbach, Thuringia (now in Germany)
• Died: June 21, 1852
• Place of death: Marienthal, Thuringia (now in Germany)

Froebel is best remembered for founding the first kindergarten. He believed in the underlying unity in nature, for him God, and emphasized that schools should provide pleasant surroundings, encourage self-activity, and offer physical training for children.

Early Life

Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (FREW-bel) had an unhappy childhood that affected his entire life. The son of Johann Jakob and Eleonore Friderica Froebel, he was left motherless when he was nine months old. His father, a Lutheran pastor, was aloof and pompous. After he remarried, he lost interest in Friedrich, who was still too young for school. After Johann’s wife bore their child, Friedrich was treated like an interloper. His stepmother addressed him in the formal third person rather than in the familiar second person normally used with children.

The father considered his son stupid and rebellious. He conveyed these feelings to Friedrich, who developed a sense of personal unworthiness. When Friedrich began school, his father insisted that he attend the girls’ school, making Friedrich feel more unusual than he already considered himself.

When he was ten, Friedrich was sent to live with a kindly uncle in Stadt Ilm, remaining there for five years. On his return home, however, the antagonisms that plagued his earlier days resurfaced, so his father apprenticed him to a woodcutter at Neuhof, the former home of educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, where he stayed for two years.

At the age of seventeen, Friedrich visited his brother, a medical student at the University of Jena. Although he was ill prepared for the university, Froebel attended elementary lectures in philosophy, the sciences, and mathematics until he was jailed by the university for indebtedness. After his father reluctantly posted his bail, Froebel drifted for five years. After a flirtation with architecture, he turned to tutoring and found that he loved teaching.

In 1805, Froebel made his first short visit to Yverdon, where Pestalozzi had just established his experimental school. After a brief stay in Frankfurt, he returned to Yverdon to spend four years as an assistant to Pestalozzi. He perceived that Pestalozzi’s approach failed both to interconnect the subjects being taught and to give much attention to the students’ spiritual connection with the universe. These reservations spurred Froebel into formulating his own philosophy of education.

Life’s Work

When Froebel completed his four-year stay at Yverdon in 1810, he returned to Frankfurt as a tutor. He soon decided, however, that he had a dual destiny. On one hand, he saw himself as a potential educational reformer. On the other, he was trying to find a unity in nature, an explanation of the mysteries of existence. Accordingly, he was enrolled in the University of Göttingen in 1811, first studying ancient languages in his search for the underlying unity in existence. He then turned his attention to mathematics, the sciences, and philosophy, subjects to which he had been exposed at Jena.

In 1812, Froebel moved to the University of Berlin to study crystallography; his interest in this subject was awakened by an essay he had written on the symbolism of spheres the preceding year at Göttingen. By 1813, he was assistant curator at the university’s museum of mineralogy. He continued his research in crystals, viewing them always as symbols of an underlying unity.

Although Froebel was offered a teaching position at the University of Berlin in 1816, he believed that his greatest contribution could be made by opening a school. In that year, in a humble cottage not far from Pestalozzi’s Neuhof, he founded the Allegemeine Deutsche Erziehungsanstalt (universal German institute of education). The student body consisted of five of Froebel’s nephews. His declared purpose was to teach people how to be free, something that he himself was still in the process of learning.

By 1817, the school had grown. Froebel moved it to more imposing quarters in nearby Keilhau. He was soon joined by Wilhelm Middendorff and Heinrich Langethal, friends he had made in 1813 during his brief service in the military. The school almost foundered in 1818 after Froebel’s marriage to Wilhelmine Hoffmeister aroused contention in the closely knit school community. The origins of the discord are perhaps attributable to homosexual overtones, overt or covert, in Froebel’s relationship with Middendorff and Langethal. One of Froebel’s brothers rescued the school with both funds and a new approach to running its business. The school’s enrollment rose to sixty.

As the enterprise succeeded, Froebel became increasingly absolutist, autocratic, and tyrannical. Students began to rebel against him, and word reached public officials that all was not well at the institution. An official investigation cleared the school of the charges against it, but the damage had been done. By 1820, Froebel’s influence was minimal, although he was associated with the school until 1831. From the Keilhau experience Froebel wrote Die Menschenerziehung (1826; The Education of Man , 1885), which details his philosophy of teaching children to age ten.

Essentially, the book is guided more by intuition than reason. It is based on nothing resembling scientific method. Froebel’s stated aim is to help his students unlock what is inside them and to find a harmony between their inner selves and the external world, which to Froebel is the entire universe. The approach is mystical and shows Froebel as a deeply religious man who, presuming a divine origin for the universe, proceeds to suggest ways to bring human beings into a balance with that divine, creating force. As Froebel searched for absolutes, his search made him increasingly absolutist.

Froebel believed that everything, no matter how small, has a purpose. His scheme of education was to lead people to discover that purpose. He agreed with Pestalozzi’s belief that, because the universe is constantly changing, nothing in life is static. This reasoning led him quite naturally to a dynamic Weltanschauung (worldview). For Froebel, people are themselves an inherent part of all activity. They can be guided by skillful teachers, but real teaching proceeds only from self-activity. Froebel’s conception of human development is not one in which infancy, childhood, youth, and maturity are separate entities, but one in which these stages are entities evolving into subsequent stages of which they are forever parts. Such speculation suggests the taxonomies of such educational theorists as Benjamin S. Bloom and Lawrence Kohlberg and also presages Sigmund Freud.

Froebel, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, presumed that children are inherently good. He thought that evil resulted from bad education. He considered the ideal educational institution to be the earliest one—the family—at whose heart, he believed, is the mother as chief teacher of the young. Froebel’s own education lacked the fundamental ingredient of effective learning—a mother who both loved and taught. Froebel virtually deified mothers, and in so doing, moved in the direction of what was to be his greatest educational contribution, the kindergarten—literally a garden whose blossoms are children. Froebel was rationalizing guilt feelings about what he perceived as his own evil when he wrote that wickedness proceeds from a mother’s neglect of her young child.

Froebel left Keilhau in 1831 and went to Switzerland, where he opened a school; he opened a second at Lucerne. Soon, however, he was forced to disband these schools, partly because Lucerne’s Catholic populace was suspicious of him and partly because his nephews, his former students at Keilhau, bore him great animosity and did everything they could to discredit him. By 1833, Froebel had developed a plan for the education of Bern’s poor, but he had yet to find his real vocation.

In 1835, Froebel was appointed director of the orphanage at Burgdorf, the site of some of Pestalozzi’s pre-Yverdon teaching, and he operated the orphanage according to Pestalozzi’s methods, training teachers at the orphanage and teaching the children. At Burgdorf, Froebel began to concentrate on the education of young children and especially of those normally considered too young for school. He left Burgdorf in 1836 to go to Berlin, where he studied nursery schools.

In 1837, at the age of fifty-five, Froebel established a school in Blankenburg, not far from Keilhau, for the training of very young children. He called it a Kleinkinderbeschäftigungsanstalt (an institution for the occupation of small children), but in 1840 he changed the name to the less cumbersome, more familiar kindergarten. In this school, he instituted his method of teaching through gifts and occupations. Children received, over a period of time, ten boxes of gifts, objects from which they could learn, and they also were assigned ten occupations, activities that would result in their creating gifts.

Part of Froebel’s technique was to devise games to interest and actively involve children both physically and mentally. He recorded these techniques in Die Pädagogik des Kindergartens (1862; Friedrich Froebel’s Pedagogics of the Kindergarten: Or, His Ideas Concerning the Play and Playthings of the Child , 1895), published posthumously. His most successful book of that period was Mutter- und Kose-lieder (1844; Mother-Play and Nursery Songs , 1878), a book containing fifty original songs and finger plays that would help mothers interact with their infants. This book attracted an enthusiastic following.

Successful though Froebel’s first kindergarten was in many respects, it fell into debt by 1844, and he had to disband it. People expressed great fears about kindergartens, worrying about the political and religious philosophies to which very young, impressionable children were exposed in Froebel’s institution, which enrolled students from ages one through seven. By 1851, the Prussian government had banned kindergartens as threats to society. Meanwhile, Froebel’s influential nephews worked hard to discredit him.

On June 21, 1852, a year after he married Luisa Leven, his second wife, who was thirty years his junior, Froebel died at Marienthal, his kindergartens banned in Prussia until 1860.

Significance

Friedrich Froebel’s experimental school, the kindergarten, has affected education and society significantly. Froebel had vigorous supporters, among them his widow and the Baroness Berthe von Marenholtz-Bülow, both of whom traveled widely to disseminate his ideas. Indeed, Charles Dickens wrote a favorable account of a kindergarten he had seen.

Mrs. Carl Schurz and her sister, both trained by Froebel, imported the kindergarten to the United States in 1855, establishing a German-language kindergarten in Watertown, Wisconsin. Elizabeth Peabody established the first English-language kindergarten in the United States in Boston in 1860.

The term kindergarten has survived in the United States, although it now frequently designates that single year before a child enters the primary grades. The kindergarten as Froebel perceived it now exists in the United States as the preschool, attended by infants of several weeks to children of four or five.

Bibliography

Brehony, Kevin J., ed. The Origins of Nursery Education: Friedrich Froebel and the English System. 6 vols. New York: Routledge, 2001. The first five volumes of this set are translations of Froebel’s books, including The Education of Man and Lessons on the Kindergarten. The last volume reprints journal articles discussing the evolution of English nursery education.

Brosterman, Norman. Inventing Kindergarten. With original photography by Kiyoshi Togashi. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1997. Brosterman is a staunch proponent of Froebel’s conception of kindergarten. His book provides biographical information on Froebel and an explanation of Froebel’s theories to advance his argument that the Froebelian conception of kindergarten is the best form of schooling for very young children.

Bruce, Tina, Anne Findlay, Jane Read, and Mary Scarborough. Recurring Themes in Education. London: P. Chapman, 1995. Examines six recurring themes in Froebel’s philosophy and explains the relationship of these ideas to the current British educational system.

Downs, Robert B. Friedrich Froebel. Boston: Twayne, 1978. An accurate, brief overview of Froebel. Solid presentation of facts, although generally short on analysis. The book serves the basic purpose for which it is intended, that of informing the reading public and college undergraduates.

Froebel, Friedrich. Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel. Translated and annotated by Emilie Michaelis and H. Keatley Moore. Syracuse, N.Y.: Bardeen, 1889. Froebel’s only autobiographical record exists in two long letters, one written to the duke of Meiningen in 1827, the other to Karl Krause in 1828. These letters, well translated and accurate, along with Johann Barop’s notes on the Froebel community, make up this useful volume. Helpful for biographical details.

Kilpatrick, William H. Froebel’s Kindergarten Principles Critically Examined. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Despite its age, an indispensable book for Froebel scholarship because it describes how the intractability of the International Kindergartners Association, founded in 1892, eventually clashed with Granville Stanley Hall’s more scientifically devised psychological approach to early childhood education. An accurate, objective assessment of an important topic.

Lawrence, Evelyn, ed. Friedrich Froebel and English Education. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953. Six British educators discuss Froebel’s influence on the schools of Great Britain and on education in general. A balanced view of Froebel’s contributions outside Germany.

Liebschner, Joachim. Child’s Work: Freedom and Play in Froebel’s Educational Theory and Practice. Parkwest, N.Y.: Lutterworth Press, 2002. The title of this book comes from Froebel’s famous remark: “A child’s work is his play.” The book describes Froebel’s educational philosophy, his motivations, and his efforts to establish programs for early childhood education. Includes translations of some of Froebel’s German texts.

Marenholtz-Bülow, Berthe von. Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel. Translated by Mary Mann. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1895. This book by one of Froebel’s former students and staunchest supporters provides important details about his later years, during which he was implementing his concept of the kindergarten.