Froebel: The Kindergarten Movement
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human nature. (For more on idealism, see Chapter 6, Philosophical Roots of Education.) He believed that every child possesses an innate interior spiritual essence, a power, striving to be externalized. Froebel designed his kindergarten as an educational environment in which children could actualize their inherent but latent spirit uality through activity. A nationalist, he believed that the people of each country, including his native Germany, shared a common folk spirit that was manifested in the nation’s stories, songs, and fables. Thus, storytelling and singing were important in the kindergarten. Froebel’s desire to become a teacher took him to Pestalozzi’s institute at Yverdon, where from 1808 to 1810, he interned in the teacher-training program. Pestalozzi served as a mentor for Froebel. Just as Pestalozzi had revised Rousseau’s ideas, Froebel restructured Pestalozzi’s method. While he endorsed Pestalozzi’s use of object teaching in an emotionally secure school atmosphere, Froebel believed that Pestalozzi’s method needed a more philosophical foundation. Giving Pestalozzi’s object lesson a more symbolic meaning, Froebel claimed that the concrete object would stimulate recall of a corresponding concept in the child’s mind. Enthusiastically accepting Pestalozzi’s vision of schools as emotionally secure places for children to learn, Froebel added that they should also be places where children grew spiritually. Like Comenius, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi, Froebel envisioned a new kind of teacher who would be sensitive to children’s readiness and needs, not pedantic taskmasters who forced children to memorize words they did not understand.
4-5a Principles of Teaching and Learning Froebel designed the kindergarten as a prepared environment in which children externalized their inner spirituality through activity. His first kindergarten, founded in 1837 at Blankenburg, was a permissive learning environment that featured games, play, songs, stories, and crafts.17 The kindergarten’s activities, now a standard part of early childhood education, stimulated children’s imaginations and introduced them to their culture’s folk heroes and heroines and values through songs and stories. Play, especially games, socialized children in group activities and developed their physical and motor skills.18 The curriculum included what Froebel called gifts, or objects with fixed form, such as spheres, cubes, and cylinders, intended to bring to consciousness
For a brief biography, time line, and excerpt from Froebel’s The Education of Man, see Madonna M. Murphy, The History and Philosophy of Education: Voices of Educational Pioneers (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill/Prentice Hall, 2006), pp. 201–209. For an online text of Froebel’s Education of Man, access www.archive.org. 18 Evelyn Lawrence, ed., Routledge Library Editions: Education Mini-Set K Philosophy of Education: Friedrich Froebel and English Education, Vol. 18 (New York and London: Routledge, 2012). For Froebel’s Education of Man, Mother Songs, and reminiscences, access the Froebel Web at www.froebelweb.org. 17
1837 Establishes kindergarten at Blankenburg
1852 Death
1830 1840 1850 1860 1870
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