In Switzerland itself, in Hofwil near Bern, Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg founded an institution for the education of the poor. He tried to build up a kind of pedagogical province or miniature state, in which work was the means of self-help and in which the pedagogical program was the joint responsibility of teachers and pupils. Froebel and the kindergarten movement
Next to Pestalozzi, perhaps the most gifted of early 19th-century educators was Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten movement and a theorist on the importance of constructive play and self-activity in early childhood. He was an intensely religious man who tended toward pantheism and has been called a nature mystic. Throughout his life he achieved very little literary fame, partly because of the style of his prose and philosophy, which is so academic and obscure that it is difficult to read and sometimes scarcely comprehensible.
In early life, Froebel tried various kinds of employment until 1805, when he met Anton Gruner, a disciple of Pestalozzi and director of the normal school at Frankfurt am Main, who persuaded him to become a teacher. After two years with Gruner, he visited Pestalozzi at Yverdon, studied at Göttingen and Berlin, and eventually determined upon establishing his own school, founded on what he considered to be psychological bases. The result in 1816 was the Universal German Educational Institute at Griesheim, transferred the following year to Keilhau, which constituted a kind of educational community for Froebel, his friends, and their wives and children. To this period belongs The Education of Man (1826), his most important treatise, though typical of his obscurantism. In 1831 he was again in Switzerland, where he opened a school, an orphanage, and a teacher-training course. Finally, in 1837, upon returning to Keilhau, he opened his first Kindergarten, or “garden of children,” in nearby Bad Blankenburg. The experiment attracted wide interest, and other kindergartens were started and flourished, despite some political opposition. The pedagogy of Froebel
Froebel’s pedagogical ideas have a mystical and metaphysical context. He viewed man as a child of God, of nature, and of humanity who must learn to understand his own unity, diversity, and individuality, corresponding to this threefold aspect of his being. On the other hand, man must understand the unity of all things (the pantheistic element).
Education consists of leading man, as a thinking, intelligent being, growing into self-consciousness, to a pure and unsullied, conscious and free representation of the inner law of Divine Unity, and in teaching him ways and means thereto.
Education had two aspects: the teacher was to remove hindrances to the self-development or “self-activity” of the child, but he was also to correct deviations from what man’s experience has taught is right and best. Education is thus both “dictating and giving way.” This means that ordinarily a teacher should not intervene and impose mandatory education, but when a child—particularly a child of kindergarten age—is restless, tearful, or willful, the teacher must seek the underlying reason and try to eradicate the uncovered hindrance to the child’s creative development. Most important, the teacher’s dictating and giving way should not flow from the mood and caprices of the teacher. Behaviour should be measured according to a “third force” between teacher and child, a Christian idea of goodness and truth.
School for Froebel was not an “establishment for the acquisition of a greater or lesser variety of external knowledge”; actually, he thought children were instructed in things they do not need. School instead should be the place to which the pupil comes to know the “inner relationship of things”—“things” meaning God, man, nature, and their unity. The subjects followed from this: religion, language and art, natural history, and the knowledge of form. In all these subjects the lessons should appeal to the pupil’s interests. It is clear that, in Froebel’s view, the school is to concern itself not primarily with the transmission of knowledge but with the development of character and the provision of the right motivation to learn.
Froebel put great emphasis on play in child education. Just like work and lessons, games or play should serve to realize the child’s inner destiny. Games are not idle time wasting; they are “the most important step in the development of a child,” and they are to be watched by the teachers as clues to how the child is developing. Froebel was especially interested in the development of toys for children—what he called “gifts,” devised to stimulate learning through well-directed play. These gifts, or playthings, included balls, globes, dice, cylinders, collapsible dice, shapes of wood to be put together, paper to be folded, strips of paper, rods, beads, and buttons. The aim was to develop elemental judgment distinguishing form, colour, separation and association, grouping, matching, and so on. When, through the teacher’s guidance, the gifts are properly experienced, they connect the natural inner unity of the child to the unity of all things (e.g., the sphere gives the child a sense of unlimited continuity, the cylinder a sense both of continuity and of limitation). Even the practice of sitting in a circle symbolizes the way in which each individual, while a unity in himself, is a living part of a larger unity. The child is to feel that his nature is actually joined with the larger nature of things. The kindergarten movement
The kindergarten was unique for its time. Whereas the first institutions for small children that earlier appeared in Holland, Germany, and England had been welfare nursery schools or day-care centres intended merely for looking after children while parents worked, Froebel stood for the socializing or educational idea of providing, as he put it in founding his kindergarten, “a school for the psychological training of little children by means of play and occupations.” The school, that is, was to have a purpose for the children, not the adults. The curriculum consisted chiefly of three types of activities: (1) playing with the “gifts,” or toys, and engaging in other occupations designed to familiarize children with inanimate things, (2) playing games and singing songs for the purpose not only of exercising the limbs and voice but also of instilling a spirit of humanity and nature, and (3) gardening and caring for animals in order to induce sympathy for plants and animals. All this was to be systematic activity.
The kindergarten plan to meet the educational needs of children between the ages of four and six or seven through the agency of play thereafter gained widespread acceptance. During the 25 years following Froebel’s death in 1852, kindergartens were established in leading cities of Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States. In Great Britain the term infant school was retained for the kindergarten plan, and in some other countries the term crèche has been used. Herbart
Johann Friedrich Herbart was a contemporary of Froebel and other German Romanticists, but he can hardly be put into the ranks of such pedagogues. During his lifetime his sober, systematic “philosophical realism” found little approval; only posthumously, during the latter half of the 19th century, did his work achieve great importance. He is regarded as one of the founders of theoretical pedagogy, injecting both metaphysics and psychology into the study of how people learn. The psychology and pedagogy of Herbart
As a young man of 18, Herbart had studied at the University of Jena under the idealist philosopher Fichte. It was a long while before he broke from the spell of Fichte’s teachings and turned to philosophical realism, which asserts that underlying the world of appearances there is a plurality of things or “reals.” Change consists simply in the alteration in the relations between these reals, which resist the changed relationships as a matter of self-preservation.